Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LAUREN F FRIEDMAN
Feb. 7, 2014
viviandnguyen / Flickr
1. Irritability
"Complaints of irritability and [emotional] volatility following sleepless
nights" are common, a team of Israeli researchers observed. They put
those complaints to the test by following a group of underslept medical
residents. The study found that the negative emotional effect of
disruptive events things like being interrupted while in the middle of
doing something were amplified by sleep loss.
Source: Sleep, 2005
2. Headaches
Scientists don't yet know exactly why sleep deprivation leads to
headaches but it's a connection doctors have noticed for more than a
century. Migraines can be triggered by sleepless nights, and 36 to 58% of
people with sleep apnea wake up with "nondescript morning headaches."
Source: Headache, 2003; Headache, 2005
3. Inability to learn
Sleepiness has long been an issue among adolescents. One study of
middle school students found that "delaying school start times by one
hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30, increases standardized test scores by at
least 2 percentile points in math and 1 percentile point in reading."
But it's not just kids. Short-term memory is a crucial component of
learning, and sleep deprivation significantly impaired the ability of adult
volunteers to remember words they'd been shown the day before. In
another study, researchers found that while people tend to improve on a
task when they do it more than once, this isn't true if they are kept awake
after they try it the first time even if they sleep again before doing it
again.
Source: Nature, 1999; Nature Neuroscience, 2000; Education Next,
2012
4. Weight gain
People who are underslept seem to have hormone imbalances that are
tied to increased appetite, more cravings for high-calorie foods, a greater
response to indulgent treats, and a dampened ability to control their
impulses a very dangerous combination. It's true that you burn more
calories when awake, but not nearly enough to cancel out the many
excess calories you consume when exhausted.
Source: Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2012; PLOS
Medicine, 2004; Nature Communications, 2013; PNAS, 2013
5. Poor vision
Sleep deprivation is associated with tunnel vision, double vision, and
dimness. The longer you are awake, the more visual errors you'll
encounter, and the more likely you are to experience outright
hallucinations.
Source: International Journal of Occupational Medicine and
Environmental Health, 2010
6. Heart disease
When researchers kept people awake for 88 hours, their blood pressure
went up no big surprise there. But even subjects who were allowed to
sleep for 4 hours a night had an elevated heart rate when compared to
those getting 8 hours. Concentrations of C-reactive protein, a marker of
heart disease risk, increased in those fully and partially deprived of sleep.
Source: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 2004; PLOS
ONE, 2009; Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2012
7. Slowness
Your reaction time is severely impeded when you don't get enough sleep.
When researchers gave West Point cadets two tests that require quick
decision-making, some were allowed to sleep between the tests, while
others were not. Those who had slept did better the second time those
who had not did worse, and their reactions slowed down. A study in
college athletes found similar results.
Source: Sleep, 2009; Asian Journal of Sports Medicine, 2012
8. Infection
You know that great thing your immune system does, where when you
get an open wound of some kind it doesn't always get infected
immediately? Prolonged sleep deprivation and even one night of
sleeplessness can impede your body's natural defenses against
microorganisms.
Source: American Journal of Physiology, 1993; The FASEB Journal,
1996
9. Economic risk-taking
Planning to make some changes to your portfolio? You might want to
make sure you're well-rested. "A single night of sleep deprivation evoked
a strategy shift during risky decision making such that healthy human
volunteers moved from defending against losses to seeking increased
gains," researchers concluded.
Source: The Journal of Neuroscience, 2011
11. Distractedness
Having trouble paying attention to what you're reading or listening to?
Struggling with anything that requires you to truly focus? "Attention
tasks appear to be particularly sensitive to sleep loss," researchers have
noted. If you want to stay alert and attentive, sleep is a requirement.
Otherwise, you enter "an unstable state that fluctuates within seconds
and that cannot be characterized as either fully awake or asleep,"
and your ability to pay attention is variable at best.
Source: Archives of Italian Biology, 2001; Seminars in Neurology, 2009
hours showed a tendency to use word repetitions and clichs; they spoke
monotonously, slowly, [and] indistinctly," one study noted. "They were
not able to properly express and verbalize their thoughts."
Source: Sleep, 1997; International Journal of Occupational Medicine
and Environmental Health, 2010
14. Colds
If you're wondering why you're sick all the time and seem to pick up
every bug that travels around the office, it's probably because you're not
getting enough sleep. When a group of 153 people were exposed to a
common cold, those who had gotten less than 7 hours of sleep in the two
weeks prior were almost 3 times more likely to get sick than those who'd
had 8 or more hours of sleep. How well you sleep is also a factor those
who had spent 92% of their time in bed actually asleep were 5.5 times
more likely to catch a cold than those who had been peacefully
slumbering 98-100% of the time they were in bed.
Source: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009
residents, and others required to stay awake for long periods of time
"show an increased risk of crashes or near misses due to sleep
deprivation."
Source: Seminars in Neurology, 2009
18. Pain
People in pain especially those suffering from chronic pain tend not
to get enough sleep. This makes sense: Pain can wake you up in the night
and make it hard to fall asleep in the first place. But recently, researchers
have begun to suspect that sleep deprivation may actually cause pain or
at least increase people's sensitivity to pain. One study found that after
research subjects were kept awake all night, their pain threshold the
amount of painful stimulus they were able to endure was lower.
Source: Journal of Sleep Research, 2001; Sleep Medicine Reviews,
2006
19. Diabetes
Being awake when your body wants you to be asleep messes with your
metabolism, which in turn increases your risk for insulin resistance
(often called "pre-diabetes") and type 2 diabetes. "Interventions to
extend sleep duration may reduce diabetes risk," one study in
20. Sloppiness
Most people notice that when they're sleepy, they're not at the top of
their game. One study found that one sleepless night contributed to a 2032% increase in the number of errors made by surgeons. People playing
sports that require precision shooting, sailing, cycling, etc. also
make more mistakes when they've been awake for extended periods of
time.
Source: The Lancet, 1998; Physiology & Behavior, 2007
21. Cancer
Scientists are just beginning to investigate the relationship between sleep
and cancer, and different kinds of cancer behave differently. But since
disrupted circadian rhythm and reduced immunity are direct results of
sleep deprivation, it's no surprise that preliminary research seems to
indicate that people who don't get enough sleep are at increased risk for
developing certain kinds of cancer, most notably colon and breast
cancers.
Source: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 2003; Pathologiebiologie, 2003; Cancer, 2011; AAOHN Journal, 2011
slept more forgot less. Poor sleep and not enough of it have also been
linked to higher levels of -Amyloid, a biomarker for Alzheimer's.
Source: Cell Signal, 2012; Nature Neuroscience, 2013; JAMA
Neurology, 2013
25. Death
Many health problems are associated with sleep deprivation and poor
sleep, but here's the big one: People who consistently do not get 7-8
hours of sleep are more likely to die during a given time period. Put more
simply: We all die eventually, but sleeping too little or even too much
is associated with a higher risk of dying sooner than you otherwise
might.
Source: Sleep, 2010; Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2010