What happens to you when you don't get enough sleep
Photos AMC
Words Matthieu Morge-Zucconi
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Sleep tight, your body needs it.
With holidays now well behind us, so is the restfulness they often symbolise. You’ve gone back to working all day (and sometimes all night), and as a result you feel much more tired than rested.
As if workdays weren’t enough, there’s always the odd night out, entire TV shows you compulsively watch until dawn, and the upstairs neighbour’s new-born who won’t stop crying. In short, you feel sleep deprived. A word of warning: tiredness can have consequences on your entire body. And no, we’re not only talking about dark circles and under-eye bags. Try to avoid making short nights a habit: not only is lack of sleep bad for your health, it’s also dangerous.
Your skin is less healthy
We’ll begin by stating the obvious: after a rough night, your skin won’t exactly be glowing. It makes sense as tiredness goes hand in hand with dark circles, puffiness, and dull skin. While we’ve all shown up to work looking worse for wear and in sore need of coffee to get through the day, you should really avoid making a habit of it. After a long (or short) night, choose to hide things if you can: apply some under-eye serum to hide your dark circles, drink a lot of water, treat yourself to a double americano, pop on a pink shirt and keep a refreshing face wipe handy. All this should be enough to help you look much healthier than you actually feel.
However, a long-term habit of sleeplessness can lead to premature skin aging, as your skin stocks up on collagen and other proteins that foster its elasticity when you sleep at night. Likewise, sleeping helps regulate your skin’s natural hydration. A lack of sleep could therefore lead to breakouts, which nobody likes.
You could accelerate hair loss
There is a link between lack of sleep and hair loss, and it’s a fairly easy one to understand. The less you sleep, the more prone to stress you’ll be, and the hormones that control hair loss (among other things) are more easily activated by the body. It turns out losing a few hours of sleep could lead to losing a lot more.
You might put on weight
At night, when you sleep, appetite-controlling hormones such as leptin (satiety hormone) and ghrelin (hunger hormone) are regulated by your body. The less you sleep, the more ghrelin your body will produce over leptin. You’ll therefore feel hungrier more often, which is obviously no good when you’re trying to keep a balanced diet.
Your memory won’t be as good
When you sleep, your brain takes in the day’s information to create lasting and stable memories. If you don’t get enough deep sleep, you risk not remembering things as you should.
Exercising won’t have the same results
Sleep helps physically recuperate from effort, in particular on a muscular level. Lack of sleep impedes this recovery and slows down your muscle gains and fat loss. Exercising won’t be as effective and might even become more painful.
You’re putting yourself in danger
Lack of sleep can lead to very serious health issues, from diabetes to heart attacks. People have also been known to die from lack of sleep, but we really hope you’re not that far gone.
Ask yourself, is binge watching both seasons of Mindhunter really worth it?
