Sleeping seems like such a non-productive activity, but getting enough, in both quality and quantity is vital for good health. Constantly short-changing yourself of sleep has serious health repercussions, including making you fat and stupid. That might sound dramatic, but a lack of sleep has been shown to impact your hormones in a way that does increase your likelihood to store fat, and being tired dulls your focus and cognitive ability. I know all about a lack of sleep. I spent years under-sleeping and over-working so can tell you first hand that it eventually catches up to you.
Your brain has these built in mechanisms designed to keep you alive. So if you’re dieting or trying to lose weight, it’ll fight the reduced energy levels so you don’t starve to death. Most brains are over-reacting little drama-queens, who carry on at the first sign of a calorie deficit. When you’re tired, the drama-queen screams even more loudly.
Here are some delights to look forward to if you lack sleep.
Increased Appetite
When you’re tired, your brain thinks your body is dangerously low on energy so tells you to eat. Sleep deprivation causes a misfiring of hormones that screw with appetite control and the ability to feel full. It’s harder to stick to a healthy diet when you’re tired because your body more strongly craves energy. Even with iron-strength will power and sticking to your diet, you’ll feel worse on the same amount of food.
Cortisol Overload
Cortisol is a great little hormone released to help with the fight or flight response when you’re under stress. It also keeps you awake at night, because if you’ve under-slept, chances are your body pumps out extra cortisol in the afternoon to get you through. This makes it hard to fall asleep later in the evening because your body is still hyped up ready to fight a tiger or something.
Impaired Recovery
Your body isn’t just doing nothing when you’re sleeping, it’s actually doing quite a bit of repairing, which is important for everyone, and super important if you workout. Not getting enough sleep increases the time needed to recover between workouts, and also impacts performance in the gym.
Getting Good Quality Sleep
Scientists won’t agree on the optimal number of sleep for humans, so I’m happy to believe we’re all a bit different. Figure out how much sleep you need, and be honest. We can all function to some extent on reduced sleep, but are you really functioning optimally? I dragged myself out of bed at 3am for years to train and work. I was sure I could function on five hours of sleep until I skipped coffee for a few days and actually let myself sleep as much as I need. Turns out at the moment about nine hours of sleep works for me. Unfortunately just being in bed for the required time each night isn’t going to cut it. You need to actually be getting good quality sleep in this time.
What could be messing with quality of sleep?
Coffee
Coffee has a range of health benefits, but generally you should avoid it for many hours before you go to bed. Everyone is a bit different, but they have found that some people can still have trouble falling asleep a whole eight hours after drinking coffee. Try to cut out your afternoon coffee to see if this helps.
Lights
Technology is a wonderful thing, it means we can be contactable at all hours and work on our computers, phones or watch TV well into the darkness. The thing is, the blue light emitted from screens tells our brains it’s daytime, and shuts off your melatonin production (an important little hormone for sleep). If you must use screens in the hour or two before bed, install a program like F.lux on your computer (https://justgetflux.com) or wear some awesome yellow glasses to block the blue light. The varied colours take some time to get used to, but if it helps you sleep it’s worth the effort.
Because it’s hard to explain, here’s what f.lux sort of does to your screen at various times of the day.
Hunger
There’s a whole range of ideas about what is best to eat at bedtime, and a lot of this assumes you’re following a certain diet during the day. To keep it simple, if you’re too full or too hungry when you’re trying to sleep, you’re going to struggle. If you find you constantly wake between 2am and 5am, some studies have shown this is due to a significant drop in blood sugar and your body releasing a shot of adrenaline to get you through. Like cortisol, adrenaline is part of the fight or flight response, and can help you fight a tiger, even if your energy stores are low. In the night, this release of adrenaline due to low sugar is to prevent you from slipping into a coma. It’s useful, but sort of annoying if you’re trying to sleep. To get around this, try eating a small snack with some protein in it at bedtime, like a few spoons of yoghurt. Of course, there could be psychological issues or stress that wakes you up at this time… That’s a whole other matter.
Do yourself a favour and commit to getting more sleep. If you really can’t sleep more or don’t feel any better after trying, then maybe you were already getting enough. Chances are though, if you’re like most busy adults, even a small increase in the quality or quantity of your sleep will make a difference to your health.
Super-cool blue light blocking safety glasses.
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