How the lack of sleep ruins your life

In modern society, it is naturally to neglect sleep. You can postpone your sleep, but not work or study. You are being imposed that sleeping a lot is kind of laziness. So if you want to be successful you need to get up at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. A lot of well-known personalities, politicians and top-managers declare that they sleep a little and work hard. But it should cause not delight, but horror: in what condition these people run a business or even a country. In our time, the culture of lack of sleep rests on caffeine and sugar.You drink coffee in the afternoon in an attempt to cope with a nap and then at night you can not fall asleep or sleep in a shallow sleep phase. As a result, in the morning you wake up broken and pour the next dose of caffeine into yourself to bring body to life, and so we end up in an endless cycle of lack of sleep.

Sleep is not a waist of time. The majority in every possible way tends to delay the time of sleep or desperately struggles with sleep. Although when your iPhone discharged, you almost instantly put it on charge. The time spent on sleep is your charge, which is no less valuable than the time of being wake.

How does a sufficient amount of sleep improve the quality of every minute of wakefulness:
– the body is renewed and restored;
– all information received during the day is saved; (So ​​it makes no sense to study instead of sleeping in the evening before exam);
– there is a detox and removal from the brain of the waste accumulated during the day;
– creating nerve cells and new connections between them;
– emotions that support emotional stability are processed;
– sleep stimulates the production of hormones.

If the previous dignity of sleep is very general, then in the case of hormone production, which is possible to specify.
Melatonin is a sleep hormone. It synchronizes the internal clock of the body with the external cycle of the time of a day. Melatonin causes drowsiness, improves mood, has anti-inflammatory effect.

Leptin is a hormone that slows down appetite and creates a feeling of satiety. Regular lack of sleep contributes to weight gain, as leptin levels fall and ghrelin rises. Ghrelin is a hormone that makes us feel hungry.

Cortisol is a stress hormone. When not getting enough sleep, the level of cortisol is far from normal, which suppresses the immune system, and increases the body’s accumulation of fats, sugars and proteins.

Growth hormone corresponds to its name and is responsible for growth. Lack of sleep in children and adolescents is fraught with consequences for all body systems. Now remember the school. In high school I had lessons five days a week from 8.30 to 14-15, a lot of homework that I`ve done often on the weekend also. And since I was an excellent student, I need to spend hours on preparation for exams and tests. My husband’s situation in the school was even worse: lessons started at 8 from Monday to Saturday, always. There were additional tasks for weekend and holidays.

Testosteroid: responsible for the functioning of the sexual organs, potency, sexual behavior, attraction, sexual thoughts and feelings, and men’s health in general. Recent studies have shown that the production of testosterone by the body is much more dependent on the duration of sleep than on circadian rhythms. Thus, lack of sleep kills the quality of sexual life.

Sleep also regulates the production of hormones of the thyroid and parathyroid glands. These hormones are responsible for many parameters important for the body: energy balance, body temperature, metabolism of sugar, fats, proteins and vitamins.

Author – Anastasiia Vekua