What happens to you, if you don’t get sleep?

What happens to you, if you don’t get sleep?

Sleep… Sleep… Sleep…

We all need sufficient sleep. Sufficient means at-least 6 hours regularly. We know that a lack of sleep will prevent our brain from being able to initially make new memories, so it is almost as though without sleep the memory inbox of the brain shuts down and we can not commit new experiences to memory. So those new incoming informational emails are just bounced, and you end up feeling as though you are amnesiac. You can’t essentially make the create those new memories.

Proper sleep renews our body system. It also makes our brains cool. After proper sleep, we can think of anything effectively. We also know that a lack of sleep will lead to a toxic protein in the brain that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease because it is during deep sleep at night when a sewage system within the brain kicks into a higher gear and it starts to wash away the toxic protein, beta-amyloid. So, if you are not getting enough sleep every night, more of that Alzheimer’s related protein will build up. The more protein that builds up, the greater your risk of going on to develop dementia in later life.

Without having sleep, we can DIE. No, it is not a joke… it’s true. We get depression. Sometimes, we need to take sleeping pills for proper sleep. We get a headache. Do you have any idea about what are the effects of sleep deprivation on the body? Well, there are many other effects too. We know that sleep deprivation affects our reproductive system. We know that men who are sleeping just five to six hours per day have a level of testosterone which is that of someone ten years their senior. A lack of sleep will age you by almost a decade in terms of that aspect of virility and wellness.

We also know that a lack of sleep impacts our immune system. And that is why we fall sick and sometimes for a proper sleep we need to take sleeping pills. So, after just one night of 4 to 5 hours of sleep, there is a 70% reduction in critical anticancer- fighting immune cells called natural killer cells. And that’s the reason that we know that short sleep duration predicts your risk for developing numerous forms of cancer. And that list currently includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the breast. The link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that recently WHO (World Health Organization) decided to classify any form of nighttime shift work as a probable Carcinogen. So, in other words, jobs that may induce cancer because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We know that a lack of sleep impacts your cardiovascular system because it is during deep sleep at night that you receive this most wonderful form of effective blood pressure medication. Our heart rate drops, blood pressure goes down. If you are not getting sufficient sleep, you are not getting that reboot of the cardiovascular system, so your blood pressure rises. If you are having less than 6 hours of sleep, there is a great chance of getting a heart attack in a lifetime. There is a global experiment that is performed on 1.6 billion people twice a year and it is called daylight saving time. And we know in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 25% increase in heart attacks that following day.

Do you have any idea about what is the recycling rate of a human being? How long can we last without asleep before we start to see declines in your body? And the answer seems to be about 16 hours of wakefulness. Once you get past 16 hours of being awake, that is when we start to see mental deterioration and physiological deterioration in the body. We know that after you have been awake for 19 or 20 hours, your mental capacity is so impaired that you would be as deficient as someone who was legally drunk behind the wheel of a car. So, if you were to ask me what is the recycle rate of human beings, it does seem to be about 16 hours and we need about 8 hours of sleep to repair the damage of wakefulness. Wakefulness is low-level brain damage.

Now we love to hear from you, what happens with you when you don’t get proper sleep?