It's a Bigger Deal than You Thought

             You stagger to your left as you make an effort to clear your dizzy head and attempt to stumble forward.  Your eyes are all glazed over with a distant blurry glare at nothing while slowly nodding off.  It's all you can do not to just pass out, falling into the snow bank to rest your two-ton eyelids.  You could probably fool any cop, but no, you only wish you were drunk or stoned right now.  At least that would be more fun than all the crazy effects that go along with a bad night's rest.  Studies show that missing as little as one hour of needed sleep can impair both your mental and physical feats just as much as two alcoholic drinks could.  "If you sleep only 4 to 6 hours a night for 2 straight weeks, your brain will function about as well as it would if you'd stayed up for 3 nights in a row," says Hans P.A. Van Dongen, Ph.D., lead author of the study.  Luckily, sleep deprivation is cumulative, so a night or two of good rest can sober us right up without a hangover.

            The causes of sleep deprivation vary between people and most are generally deliberate.  Some of us lose sleep due to work or even just family and friends.  We could even go the other direction and stay up late because it's the only time we get to ourselves (like me).  Different foods and drinks can also affect how late we stay up, and of course there will always be stress and anxiety to keep us up due to things like tests, and Christmas.  Hopefully as we mature most of us don't often get scared sleepless after nightmares, though there are cases where we're unable to avoid certain other very unfortunate traumatic events in our lives (my sympathies to them).

            There are some causes which are rather surprising to learn.  For instance, Pilcher and Huffcutt found that sleeping intermittently for short periods of time (even naps, or hitting the snooze button a few times), can be worse than staying up all night long, at least in regard to test performance.  They have come to the conclusion that this is because such actions send signals to confuse the biological clock, which creates a greater sleep debt.  However, staying up all night has been shown to stimulate the body into some kind of an emergency mode that will permit it adjust to a sleepless state, and secrete more cortisol for energy.  Napping, if longer than 30 minutes, will make you groggy.  Sleeping in on weekends will also throw off the biological clock and cause sleeplessness, so in some ways it is not good to simply assume that "catching up on weekends" will work. . . at least it may take your biological clock a few days to get back to normal sleeping habits (assuming your intention is to get back to healthy sleeping habits of course).

            Believe it or not, age and gender also play a role in our sleep deficits.  Kantrowitz & Springen state that, "Researchers have found adolescents' natural body clock keeps them up until at least 11pm."  This severely hurts these adolescents as most schools start early in the morning, and thus lack of sleep is virtually unavoidable.  Contrary to popular belief, it's not the amount of sleep required for an individual that decreases with age, it's the capacity for being able to stay asleep that changes with old age.  Women tend to be sleep deprived more frequently than men.  Men, however, are at a greater risk of not being able to cope with that stress and all the factors that coincide with a lack of sleep.

            As previously mentioned, occasionally you even find those people who don't have much choice in whether they sleep well or not.  It may even be a sleep disorder, or a biological/chemical balancing factor.  In either case, they are subject to the same risks and symptoms as the rest of us, though they may possibly be more habituated with how to deal with the adverse side-affects.  Even insomniacs experience periods of "microsleep" sessions for fractions of a second long in REM which is long enough to keep a person alive.  The difference is that typical chronic sleep deprivation may feel ok to you, not because five to seven hours of sleep is all that you need, but perhaps because you don't even remember what it feels like to be fully rested and awake anymore.  Besides, the effects are frequently cloaked with different stimulants; and whether it affects your performance or not, it will often affect your health.

            Thus we see that the cause can vary differently from person to person, but the effects of such actions are almost always consistent and fairly predictable from case to case regardless of the reason or cause behind the lack of sleep.  Some of these effects are well known and commonly recognized, while others are astonishing and sometimes more subtle to discover.

            Besides obviously just plain being tired, one of the most significant physiological consequences induced upon an individual for sleep deficit is the highly increased amounts of cortisol which is secreted.  Cortisol, also called "the stress hormone" or "the death hormone" by many scientists, is a steroid type hormone that regulates blood pressure, cardiovascular function, and the body's use of proteins, carbohydrates and fats.  Any kind of stress, whether it is physical or psychological, sets off a chain reaction by increasing cortisol secretion which causes a breakdown of muscle protein, which in turn releases amino acids that are used by the liver to synthesize glucose for energy, thus raising the blood sugar level so the brain will have more glucose as fuel.  It also releases lots of "fatty acids" from the fat cells for the muscles.  The reason cortisol is termed "the death hormone" is because it actually prepares our body to die.  While cortisol increases with age, it makes the growth hormones decrease, which causes us to age.

            Thus we can see that with this one factor alone, lacking sleep can cause potential serious detrimental side-effects.  Blood sugar levels can sky-rocket as can blood-pressure itself.  It can lead to depression, and cause instability in many other hormones such as growth.  It degrades memory encoding and retrieval and if consistently high, will even cause reduced muscle-mass.  It impairs your immune system, and activates fat storage enzymes in cells which will help cause obesity.

            Even a short amount of deprived sleep will cause other physiological repercussions akin to slow reflexes and poor motor skills to occur.  We're all used to seeing people with black circles under their eyes, but you can't see how staying awake too long builds up adenosine, which is believed to make the brain fatigued.

            Studies on the cognitive effects of missing out on sleep-time have shown that it causes reduced performance in an assortment of mental tasks and problem solving.  We already mentioned that it affects the encoding and retrieval of memory, but it is important to note that this severely damages the learning process.  It even goes so far as to decrease writing and speaking skills, which is enough evidence in and of itself to prove that the amount of sleep attained at night does have a strong correlation to the grade received in a given class (at least classes that use writing and speaking skills such as a language class), or even on a lower scale such as a single test.

            Of all of the symptoms of sleep deficiency, perhaps the most misdiagnosed is that of depression.  Sleep deprivation has nearly all the same symptoms of depression.  You feel like there is a great lack of energy, irritability, difficulty concentrating, major mood swings, etc.  It is all there.  Some individuals may even end up on medication for it for years, being treated for a malady which they do not even contain.

            Ever wonder why people are so irritated when they haven't slept?  Dreaming is a key participant in how our bodies rejuvenate itself.  A normal good quality dream pattern will begin with negative dreams at first, and gradually decrease by morning.  "Dreaming is a mood-regulatory process that helps you get rid of anger and other emotional issues," explains Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the Sleep Disorder Service and Research Center at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.  If we do not attain the necessary amount of sleep, then we are not able to cope with our problems as effectively, the cortex part of our brain (the cognitive/thinking/rational part) shuts down and we begin running on "limbic brain" which basically means we're controlled by emotions, and our inhibitions are weakened severely, all of which can make us appear to be bi-polar or have major mood swings.  This in turn negatively affects our relationships with other people, including family, friends and work.

            The negative consequences for staying up late and sacrificing our sleep (intentionally or not) will almost always far outweigh the benefits (assuming you are intentionally losing sleep).  A lack of sleep causes increased stress and anxiety, and ironically increased stress and anxiety increases lack of sleep into a never ending cycle.  The solution?  Calm down, relax, try to avoid the whole mess in the first place and just go to bed earlier and for more time.

Works Cited

Alberts, Nuna. "The Healing Power of Sleep." Good Housekeeping;. 230.3 (2000): 55

Christodoulou, George N., and George N. Papadimitriou.  "Gains From Lost Sleep." Mental Health Letter; Jan. 1994: 10.7, 7.

Goh, Victor Hng-Hang, et al. "Effects of One Night of Sleep Deprivation on Hormone Profiles and Performance Efficiency."  Military Medicine, 166.5 (2001): 427-431.

Kantrowitz, Barbara.  "Why Sleep Matters".  Newsweek 22 Sept. 2003: 75

McGinnis, Marianne, Drozd, Shelly. "Sleep It Off." Prevention; 55.6 (2003): 82.

"Paging Mr. Sandman."  Nursing; Sept. 2000: 30.9, 74.

Stieg, Bill; Goins, Liesa.  "Snooze and Lose".  Men's Health Sept. 2003: 56.

 "Too Little Sleep Impairs the Way Your Body Handles Food." Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter; Mar. 2000: 18.1, 3.

 Anyway, let me know what you think!