Sleep Deprivation

“I can sleep when I’m dead!” Ever said either of those things to yourself? Or do you no longer have to say these things to yourself because you run on four to five hours of sleep pretty much every night? You’re used to it. You don’t need sleep, right? That’s for lazy, unmotivated people who don’t have things to do. You’re way more productive than the average bear. People seem to wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. In our society, overtime and eighty-hour weeks are signs of the motivated, the high achievers, and the people that get ahead. No wonder I never considered my lack of sleep to be a problem. Well, turns out skipping sleep really isn’t getting any of us ahead. It’s making us sick. It’s making us depressed. It’s making us fat and aging us at an accelerated rate. Chronic sleep deprivation can cause numerous mechanisms to go wonky inside the body. First, let’s talk about how lack of sleep affects several hormones and metabolic processes in the body. Studies have shown that just a week of sleep deprivation can cause significant alterations in glucose tolerance. Impaired glucose tolerance can make you more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In fact, studies have shown that people who have slept less than five to six hours per night were twice as likely to develop diabetes. Oh, and let’s not forget how sleep deprivation affects our cognitive skills. Studies have shown that chronic and acute sleep deprivation will negatively impact learning and thinking. Attention, alertness, reaction time, memory, reasoning skills, and creative thinking all suffer when we don’t get enough sleep - both acutely and chronically. See, all that cramming you did for tests back in college? Wasted. You should’ve just stayed out and partied. Lastly, when sleep suffers, so does your immune system. There are specific types of immune cells, namely cytotoxic natural killer cells and CTL, floating around in