#6 Ways How Sleep Deprivation Is Killing You Slowly and Steadily Did you know lack of sleep has some serious effects on your body and brain?

By Priyadarshini Patwa

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Spent your night working hard in the office or turning and tossing in bed? Missing the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep daily makes you more than just grumpy and groggy.

You might not know it has a huge impact on your health, brain, sensory organs, sex life, and chronic problems. While we understand work is essential, don't let it deprive you of sleep.

Here are 6 serious effects of sleep loss on your body:

Dumbing Down Your Brain

Sleep plays a vital role in the thinking process. Lack of It (it) hurts your ability to learn and affects the cognitive process. It diminishes your reasoning, attentiveness, concentration, and problem-solving process.

This simply makes it difficult for you to learn anything new, which impacts your performance. Enough sleep is also required as it helps in collecting memories, missing on sleep won't be able to store what you have learned and experienced.

Depression Disorders

The rate of depression is rising, but lack of sleep adds to your blues. Reports have shown that people who suffer from anxiety and depression often sleep less than six hours at night.

The most common sleeping disorder, insomnia's first symptom is depression. They are two parasites that feed on each other and harm your body in the most harmful manner. A night of good sleep can fix your anxiety and depression issues.

Delete and Forget Things

Want to have a sharp memory but finding it difficult? Maybe you need to check your sleep cycle. For consolidating memory, our brain has a function which is called "sharp wave ripples". These ripples transfer whatever we learn from hippocampus to the neocortex also called neopallium.

The function of the hippocampus is to form new memory and is associated with emotions and learning while neopallium is involved in essential brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language.

The whole process of ripple takes place during our sleeping hours. So now you know what lack of sleep can do.

Killing Your Sex Drive

Alert! Sleep deprivation lowers libido and reduces your sex drive. Less sleep often dumbs down your energy, drive and leads to crankiness and tension. In men, less sleep leads to respiratory problems that have a direct impact on your sexual performance.

A study by the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism points out that men with sleep apnea have low testosterone levels.

You Are At RISK

Sleep deprivation has some serious health issues that put you at major risk:

  • Chronic diseases like heart attack, heart failure, strokes and irregular heartbeat

  • Hypertension

  • Diabetes

Impairs Judgement

Lack of sleep affects how we perceive an event. This simply takes away your ability to make a sound judgment at the curial time. There are huge chances that you might not be making wise decisions which will hurt you personally and professionally.

Reports have shown that sleep-deprived people are prone to poor judgment.

Having said that, our work and schedules have made us prone to function on less sleep. If you think you are doing brilliantly well on less sleep, you might want to rethink. These causes can lead to some major problems.

Priyadarshini Patwa

Former Features Editor, Entrepreneur India

Priyadarshini Patwa is the Former Features Editors of Entrepreneur India and hosted an Instagram show every Friday named ‘Lighten Up’, about people from different walks of life and talk about their work and beyond. She handled the lifestyle, features, technology, entertainment segments and was also responsible for the Digital Covers. Previously she has worked with MensXP, a Times of India entity and Deccan Chronicle. 

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