The Consequences of Sleep Deprivation

Depression & Self Esteem
Sleep-deprived children have longer illnesses, more severe depression, and greater fatigue than those who aren’t sleep deprived. Other studies link sleep deprivation with self esteem problems as well. Getting good sleep and curing insomnia helps with fight depression and increase self esteem.

Beauty Rest is Fiction
Alex Gardner of the British Psychological Society and emeritus professor of dermatology Ronnie Marks of the University of Wales found that sleep deprivation did not alter study participants’ physical appearance. However, the study participants who were sleep deprived felt self-conscious about their appearance and thought their skin showed their lack of rest. They were convinced their looks were affected by their lack of sleep, even though they looked the same as when they were rested. Getting good sleep makes you feel better about yourself. Sleep deprivation can lower your self esteem.

Weight Gain
If you’re losing sleep your body mass index (BMI) is likely to increase, and so is your waist circumference. Your risk of becoming obese is almost doubled, according to Professor Francesco Cappuccio of Warwick Medical School. He detected this trend in adults and kids as young as five years old. Getting good sleep can help you lose weight.
Sleep deprivation increases appetite through hormonal changes. Specifically, more of the appetite-increasing ghrelin is produced when you’re not getting good sleep; less of the appetite-suppressing leptin is produced. Sleep deprivation and insomnia naturally causes you to eat more.

Memory Loss
Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen of the Harvard Medical School found that “sleep protects memories from interference.” The more quickly you fall asleep after studying for a test or learning a new skill, the more likely you’ll remember it later. If you learn new information and then go about your daily business, you’ll have about a 44% lower chance of retaining what you’ve learned. This research could be particularly helpful when you’re learning a new job. Getting good sleep helps your memory, while sleep deprivation damages it.

Intellectual Impairment
Researchers at the University of Virginia have found that insomnia or lack of sleep can impair IQ and cognitive development in children. Lower grades and poor peer relations could also result from sleep deprivation. Getting good sleep increases cognitive ability.

Physical Impairment
According to the National Sleep Foundation, your body does show the effects when you’re not getting good sleep. Your coordination and motor functions may be impaired, and your reaction time may be delayed. You could have reduced cardiovascular performance, reduced endurance, and increased levels of fatigue because of sleep deprivation. Tremors and clumsiness can also result if you’re not getting good sleep.

So now decide to go to bed early by following the below mentioned steps everyday.
•For most of the people who go to bed late it’s mostly a problem of mentality. You look at the clock and think “02:00? Oh, no problem, I’ve still got plenty of time”. No, you don’t. When you make it a habit to go to bed way past midnight, your idea of late becomes an increasingly later hour. So, the next time you look at the clock and see it’s past 23:30 (or any time you’d consider ‘early’), abandon everything you were doing at that time and start hurrying to go to bed. The first step in starting to go to bed early is redefining your idea of ‘early’ and ‘late’.

•One good incentive is recalling a time (or several) when your lateness in getting to bed had disastrous results: you overslept, didn’t get enough sleep, became sick, etc. Also, if you’re a habitual late-nighter (e.g. college student), this will give you a chance to see that rarest of natural phenomena: a sunrise!

•Most of the time I wake-up at 7:00, but sometimes I wake-up at 6:00 to do homework” isn’t a good answer. If you planned on waking up at 6 then you would think that going to bed an hour earlier would make up for it, but you wouldn’t be tired at said bedtime, so you would lay in bed for an hour and only get 7 hours of sleep. Your wake-up time needs to be the same every day except for rare occasions. Weekends are not rare.

•Determine how long it actually takes you to fall asleep. Don’t glance at the alarm clock constantly to test this, just think whether you lay in bed for what seems for hours, or does your head barely hit the pillow? If the first one is the case you should subtract on hour from the time you have. If your head barely hits the pillow you only need about five minutes in bed before your -8 hour time. If you’re somewhere in between 30 minutes should be a safe amount of time to be in bed before you need to fall asleep.

•The computer may be calming but your brain naturally makes you sleepy when it is dark, so by staring at a screen you are keeping yourself alert and wide-awake for longer than you should. A shower is an excellent thing to do before bed. Make your activity a sort of ritual. This helps.

•The best time to go to bed is when you can’t stop yawning and feel the need to just close your eyes and lay your head down. If you force yourself to stay awake, after this stage is over, you’ll have a slight headache because of tiredness, but stop feeling that urge to go to sleep, which makes you stay awake even more.

•Force yourself to turn off the computer and TV before bed. By turning off the computer (not the monitor) you would have to wait for it to reboot and normally that is enough to persuade you to get off the computer. Throw the remote for your TV across the room or onto the floor (gently). Getting up to turn on the TV hardly seems worth it, huh?

•After you have been following a bed time for a week or so,

Read more on this article at http://sanojj.blogspot.com/2010/01/early-to-bed-and-wake-up-healthy.html

 

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Tags: Health, body mass index bmi, francesco cappuccio, harvard medical school, body-mass-index