The Risks of Not Getting Enough Sleep

The Risks of Not Getting Enough Sleep

We hear about ways to get a good night's sleep every now and then, but we don't often think about how not getting enough sleep can hurt our health and happiness.

Every day feels like a race against time because of all the paperwork from job or school and other chores around the house. And then there are the computer games, late-night TV shows, parties, and other things that make it hard to stay focused. In the end, all the hours that should have gone to a decent night's sleep go to all of these, steadily taking away the rest your body needs and making you feel sleepy the next day. Be careful if you're used to living this way. You may not have thought about how horrible things you do to your body might affect it, but they can.

I. The Costs to Society and the Economy

There are health hazards to getting only a few hours of sleep each night, but we can't overlook the fact that these risks are bad for the economy. The Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, says that 50 to 70 million Americans have long-term sleep disorders, and as many as 30 million have chronic insomnia.

What happened? Fatigue costs the economy $150 billion a year in lost productivity and accidents, while fatigued rivers cause at least $48 billion in motor vehicle accidents each year.

The paper, called "Sleep Deprivation and Sleep Disorders: An Unmet Public Health Problem," claims that Americans have been getting less sleep in recent decades because of longer work days, computers, and TV shows.

That implies you'll have to take more days off work if you have insomnia. Virginia Godet-Cayre led a research at the Health Economics Research in France that found that workers who had trouble going asleep missed an average of 5.8 days of work a year, while "good sleepers" only missed 2.4 days. The group looked into the employment histories of 369 people who couldn't sleep and 369 people who were getting enough sleep. The study, which came out in the February issue of Sleep, claims that 50% of the people who couldn't sleep had at least one time of absence during the course of two years, compared to 34% of the other group.

II. Teens and Sleep

Not just adults are not getting enough sleep these days. The National Sleep Foundation says that barely 20% of teens in the US receive the required 9 hours of sleep each night. That number is scary because it means that millions of individuals have trouble paying attention in class, are late for school, or are tired while driving.

III. Don't just think about your diet if you want to lose weight.

Do you want to know a secret? To get a good figure, you need to do more than just eat less and work out regularly. You need to live a healthy life. I'm not a fitness expert, but health studies are showing more and more that there is a correlation between how many hours of sleep you get and how likely you are to be overweight.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield from Columbia University and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, along with James Gangwisch, an epidemiologist at Columbia, did a study that found that people who slept less than four hours were 73% more likely to be obese, and people who slept an average of five hours were 50% more likely to be obese. People who only got 6 hours had 23% more.

Why? You can blame it on grehlin, a chemical that makes people desire to eat more.

People's leptin levels drop when they don't get enough sleep.

Leptin is a protein in the blood that makes them less hungry and tends to change how their body knows when it has had enough to eat.

So don't think that dieting is the only method to acquire a great body. From now on, make sure you get enough sleep as well.

IV. And More Illnesses, Too

If you're already tired of hearing about the terrible things that will happen to you if you don't get enough rest, here are a few more for you to know.

People who don't get enough sleep are twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease as people who do get enough sleep.

And if you're a guy, keep reading. You might be interesting to know that men who don't get enough sleep are putting themselves at risk for erectile dysfunction. That happens when they don't get enough sleep and their testosterone levels drop, which makes it harder for them to keep an erection.

People between the ages of 53 and 93 are more likely to get diabetes. A research that Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University, helped write said that.

The results, which were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, showed that older people who slept less than 5 hours were 2.5 times more likely to get the sweet condition than those who slept 6 hours, who were 1.7 times less likely to get it.

But don't expect that getting more sleep will fix the problem. The study found that older people who slept more than nine hours had a 1.7 times increased chance of dying.

Lastly, not getting enough sleep makes it harder for a person to learn how to navigate to a new place. The Journal of Neurophysiology published this finding, which revealed that new brain cells are made in the Hippocampus portion of the brain while people are learning about space. Sleep is vital for keeping these brain cells alive.

V. The End

We all know that sleep is really important for our health, and now that we know what we can be going through when we don't get enough of it, what should we do next?

There needs to be more study done in the field of sleep medicine, and people need to be made more aware that getting enough sleep is very, very important for everyone, young and old, even with all their responsibilities, late-night TV shows, and caffeinated drinks. And I bet you agree with what I'm saying if you're reading this.

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