What happens if you don’t get enough sleep?

Useful tips/18 January 2021

Today I want to write to you about how lack of sleep affects our different organs and our health in general, with the hope that the more you know about it, the more likely you’ll be able to go to bed on time tonight by giving up the things you’re used to before bed.

Let’s start in order:

• Alzheimer’s disease risk.

People who don’t sleep enough have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease because the human brain has a lymphatic system that works like a cleansing system. It is at night, during deep sleep that glial cells (glial cells) shrink in volume by up to 200%, a gap is created between them through which cerebrospinal fluid passes, which cleans out all the toxic beta-amyloid that keeps building up. The accumulation of beta amyloid and tau protein is linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s, meaning if deep sleep is not enough, then the cleansing system can’t do its job. It has been scientifically proven that as little as 1 night of lack of deep sleep results in a significant increase in beta-amyloid and tau-protein levels and get a correlation between lack of sleep and Alzheimer’s disease.

• Cardiovascular disease

There was a longitudinal study where for 5 years, scientists tracked (track-tracked) a group of people who didn’t have any cardiovascular disease. A certain percentage of them slept less than 5 hours a night. These people had a 200-300 times increased risk of coronary artery calcification over those 5 years, which in itself is a risk for heart attack.

• Nervous system balance

Every person has two parts of the autonomic nervous system: sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic is fight or flight, the parasympathetic is rest and digest. It is very important that these two systems are balanced. When a person is sleep-deprived, the sympathetic system starts to drive the entire nervous system, i.e. the blood pressure rises, the heart rate increases, and large amounts of adrenaline and cortisol are produced in the blood. All of this causes the sympathetic system to come to the forefront and the balance, which is essential for health, is skewed.

• Nutrition

Here it’s simple. The hormones responsible for eating are: leptin, which tells us we are satiated and ghrelin, which signals that we are hungry. When sleep deprivation produces insufficient amounts of the hormone leptin, when the amount of ghrelin on the contrary increases. This leads to the fact that a person overeats every day from 300 to 450 kcal per day, again and again loading his body. This results in excess weight gain.

• Cognitive factors

Lack of sleep impairs impulse control. From a cognitive standpoint, sleep deprivation shuts down our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for controlling all of our impulses. The more primitive brain begins to dominate, which contributes to a person following their hedonic impulses, that is, for their pleasure, which is not always good for health, whether it be choosing certain foods or other destructive habits.

• Immune system

Sleep is the strongest regulator of our immune system. Lack of sleep reduces the number of macrophage cells, which dispose of foreign toxic bodies and substances from the body and fight infected and tumor cells.

• Epigenetics

Epigenetics is the inherited changes in the expression of our genes. There are a total of 20,000 genes in the genome. In a scientifically proven experiment, people slept 6 hours one week each night. During 1 week of sleep deprivation, there were changes in 711 of the 20,000 genes. Those genes that are responsible for processes that contribute to the development of information processes in the body, stress, malignancy, are activated. Genes that are responsible for our immunity are suppressed. Think about it, everyone is afraid to eat genetically modified foods, do things every day with their lifestyle that further or similarly affect epigenetic changes from external substances, yet do nothing in their daily activities - little quality sleep.

• Reproductive health

This section applies to both women and men. Generally speaking, when men sleep 5-6 hours, they "age" by 10 years with lack of sleep on testosterone, which also leads to weight gain. In addition, lack of sleep affects sperm concentration and motility. In women, lack of sleep suppresses follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), one of the factors necessary to conceive a child. Therefore, couples who work 18 hours a day and systemically get little sleep - have infertility problems.

• Mental health

In scientific experiments, when a person is deprived of the rham-sleep stage - the REM sleep phase, the reset button for our emotional state, they develop increased anxiety, depression and moreover 1 day of sleep deprivation entails a state of anxiety disorder. Scientists now believe that mental disorder and sleep disorder affect each other, which becomes a vicious circle. A person can’t sleep and it makes them feel bad, and vice versa, if they feel bad mentally they don’t sleep well.
All pills, substances, which supposedly give a person sleep, but in fact just bring him into unconsciousness, they do not give exactly those stages of sleep, which are necessary for a person to get the effect of "emotional reset" or the stage of deep sleep. Therefore, it is necessary to know, adhere to and competently apply the basic rules of sleep hygiene in order to regain a healthy sleep by non-pharmacological methods. Below is a link to the article.

Basic rules of sleep hygiene. What you need to know to fall asleep quickly and deeply.

• Beauty

Little sleep makes a person less attractive. During sleep, skin regeneration takes place. Lack of sleep is primarily reflected on the face - early wrinkles, unhealthy complexion and puffiness appear.

Health is also beauty, and sleep is health, so sleep and be healthy.

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