We all know lack of sleep can make us groggy, grumpy, and irritable.  What you may not know is lack of sleep may also give you high blood pressure, steal your memories, make you more prone to illness, give you a higher risk for cancer, and cause you to gain weight. Not just that, it also comparitively reduces your ability to work and be productive. Speaking of, also check ways to minimize noise at workplace as it can seriously mess with your brain and steal your peace of mind, and some good sleep hours. One of the noises can come from a monotonous creaky fan which’d be in dire need of oiling or just needs to be replaced, and that which’d spoil your much-needed rest. If that’s the case, you can always assuage your worriment for not getting adequate sleep by getting a seamlessly noiseless fan from https://aquietrefuge.com/best-white-noise-fans/. Once you get it from here, you can shove your worries under the bed and have your slumber.

A lot is unknown about sleep, but what studies have concluded is our bodies regulate themselves while sleeping.  If we’ve done something to stress our system during the day (or at night for those night owls), our bodies work to bring themselves back to baseline as we sleep.  Here are some brief explanations of how lack of sleep can affect BP, memories, the immune system, and put you at higher risk for cancer.

• Blood Pressure rises and falls throughout the day.  In fact if a doctor were to only take your Blood Pressure when you exercise almost every person would be classified as Hypertensive.  At night though most people’s blood pressure is able to fall to it’s lowest level.  If you don’t get enough sleep this doesn’t happen.  Over time it can make your normal blood pressure higher than it should be.
• The brain also resets and sorts itself at night.  During the day it is working to process all the stimuli it encounters.  Everything you see, touch, smell, and taste are all processed in the brain.  During the night when you are no longer receiving input from the world, the brain finally has time to sort what it’s taken in.  Without adequate sleep this won’t happen causing some of your memories to get lost in translation.
• While the immune system is vital to keeping us alive, it isn’t vital for every day functions.  Therefore, when we stress our system the energy we do have goes to fuel the every day functions leaving the immune system weaker.  While we sleep the immune system is able to build itself up so it can work to protect you during your day.
• Cancer in itself is the body failing to correct a mistake during the transcription of your DNA.  Depending on the error or your particular DNA some people are already at higher risk, however, if you don’t get enough sleep you are taking away from your body’s time and ability to self correct and heal itself.

Lack of Sleep Causes weight gain (and will also make it harder to lose weight!) through 3 different avenues:

1. Your workouts suffer.  This one is easy.  The less you sleep the less motivated you are to work out and the less energy you have to give to your workouts.  Not only will your workouts suffer, but you will accumulate less movement during your day due to fatigue.  It’s simple, if you aren’t burning as many calories you most likely will gain weight and you definitely won’t be losing weight!
2. Your body is more likely to go into starvation mode.  Just like the above symptoms of weight loss, without sleep the body doesn’t have time to go back to baseline.  Therefore, it won’t have time to break down fat into energy.  This will put the body in starvation mode.   Starvation mode means the body shuts down “unnecessary” functions to survive off of minimal calories.  As you have probably heard before it takes energy to maintain muscle.  Therefore cutting back on unnecessary functions means the body will begin to breakdown muscle for energy rather than fat.  Not only will you begin to look softer and rounder, your metabolism will also decrease making your already decreased caloric intake less effective.  That means you can cut back all you want, but it won’t be as effective as just getting 7-8 hours of sleep.
3. You will be hungrier.   Many of you probably feel hungrier when you don’t get sleep.  This isn’t just a feeling.  There is an actual hormonal response happening.  According to Colette Bouchez author of the “The Dream Diet: Lose Weight While You Sleep”, when you sleep it causes leptin levels to drop and ghrelin levels to rise.  Leptin and ghrelin are the two main hormones involved in appetite.  When you eat leptin levels rise dropping ghrelin levels telling your body you are full and satisfied.  When you haven’t eaten in a while ghrelins levels rise telling the body you are hungry.

As you can see there are many factors at work trying to sabotage your body when you don’t sleep.  Diets are hard enough without having to battle the affects of sleep deprivation.  Sleep should be a part of your everyday health plan and for sure a part of your weight loss program!