These 5 things happen when you don’t get enough sleep

lack of sleep
These 5 things happen when you don’t get enough sleep

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Most people occasionally have difficulty sleeping. But if we sleep too little over the long term, this can have serious consequences for our health.

Our need for sleep is very individual – some people get by with just six hours of sleep, others need nine to ten hours. But usually seven to eight hours of sleep are optimal for us to be fit and healthy.

We usually feel it right away if we haven’t slept well for a night. Then we feel tired and lacking energy, and mood swings are also a common symptom. So it is no wonder that our health can suffer badly if we sleep too little over a long period of time.

This is what happens when you don’t get enough sleep

1. The concentration decreases

Body and mind regenerate during the night. If we don’t sleep enough, our brain suffers because it doesn’t get enough rest. The consequences: Difficulty concentrating and forgetfulness. We store our memories, including everything we have learned, during the deep sleep phase. If we don’t have enough of them or if the phases are too short, this has consequences for the performance of our brain. Typical symptoms of lack of sleep are therefore sentence construction errors or forgetting of words.

2. You are more easily irritable

Those who sleep too little react more sensitively to sensory stimuli and are therefore less able to distinguish between important and unimportant stimuli. Loud noises such as signal tones can therefore be a much more challenging problem if you are not getting enough sleep. In fact, this is similar to the behavior of schizophrenia patients: inside, whose brain has difficulty separating the important from the unimportant.

3. The risk of various diseases increases

Lack of sleep increases the risk of various diseases. If you don’t sleep enough, your heart rate rises and your body temperature drops. This weakens your immune system. The risk of cardiovascular diseases such as arteriosclerosis, a heart attack or stroke also increases, like one Meta-analysis of various studies confirmed.

Further health risks from too little sleep are increased blood pressure and an extreme slowdown in blood sugar breakdown and thus a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes. But the risk of mental illnesses such as depression is also increasing.

4. Your skin ages prematurely

When you don’t get enough sleep, your body releases an excess of the stress hormone cortisol. This attacks the skin structure, makes it thinner and dries it out. This contributes to premature skin aging, less elasticity and increased wrinkling.

5. You can gain weight

During sleep, our body releases satiety hormones such as leptin. Otherwise we would wake up from sheer hunger – after all, the night is the longest phase of the day in which we do not eat any food. So when we don’t sleep, the body doesn’t release these satiating substances, but instead releases appetite-stimulating hormones such as ghrelin – and we are more hungry.

Our bodies have an appetite for foods rich in fat and carbohydrates when we lack sleep, because they are the quickest way to satisfy hunger. Too little sleep can lead to weight gain and increase the risk of obesity, which is dangerous to health.

Sources used: diabetes-deutschland.de, geo.de, quarks.de

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