Health Consequences of Avoiding Mr. Sandman

Everyone says sleep is important, but nobody specifies why. I wanted to learn what our organs are doing while we’re unconscious. I’ve found that the following are the top two reasons why sleep is so essential for health. 

Your Brain on Sleep

Getting enough sleep reduces the risk of injuries. Several parts of the brain need the body to rest. Resetting allows it to work more efficiently. Without sleep, your cerebellum, the part responsible for coordination, won’t be as active. The lack of deep sleep keeps your brain in a state of alertness. This leads to the network between the cerebellum and the gyri getting disrupted. The two work together to react to the surrounding area. The level of communication between the two is proportionate to reaction time. When sleep is decreased, both communication and reaction times slow down.

For instance, without sleep, your hand-eye coordination might be off, causing more stumbles, twists, slips, and trips. One minute you’re doing the dishes while dozing off, the next minute you think you see a bug, then you try to recoil, only to land wrong. Now you’re splayed out on the ground with a sprained ankle. There was no bug in the first place. It was just your tired mind playing tricks on you. You’re left betrayed by both your eyes and your lack of balance. Was it your brain that betrayed you? Or was it your body unable to relax the night before, leading to sleep deprivation?

The cerebellum also has a link to the frontal lobe. This is thought to be related to psychomotor vigilance, meaning the combination of neurological reaction times and attention. Due to sleep deprivation, you might pay less attention to your surroundings. This could lead to preventable mistakes such as tripping or bumping into things.

Sleep is the New Spinach

Sleep also prevents muscle deterioration and training plateaus. The brain releases the most muscle-building hormones when you’re in a deep state of sleep. When you’re not quite in that deep sleep state and are rather in the constant “Am I awake?”/ “Am I falling?” state, your body thinks that it’s still up. It can’t get to that zone where there’s a higher level of growth hormone and testosterone. Instead, your body gets stressed out because your breathing isn’t slowing, and neither is your heart rate. 

When your body senses stress, it releases stress hormones, such as cortisol. This tends to at best disrupt muscle building and at worst eat away at muscles. Not only does it decrease muscle gains, but it also increases your risk of heart problems, chronic illness, and diabetes because your body is never at rest.

Essentially, sleep is mandatory for long-term health, injury prevention, and muscle gains. It impacts every aspect of your life, both internally and externally. Put down the coffee and go to bed. Else you fail at the gym, whether it’s a rep or a faceplant.

Sources

  Chennaoui, M., Vanneau, T., Trignol, A., Arnal, P., Gomez-Merino, D., Baudot, C., Perez, J., Pochettino, S., Eirale, C., & Chalabi, H. (2021). How does sleep help recovery from exercise-induced muscle injuries? Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 24(10), 982–987. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2021.05.007

  Lamon, S., Morabito, A., Arentson‐Lantz, E., Knowles, O., Vincent, G. E., Condo, D., Alexander, S. E., Garnham, A., Paddon‐Jones, D., & Aisbett, B. (2021). The effect of acute sleep deprivation on skeletal muscle protein synthesis and the hormonal environment. Physiological Reports, 9(1), e14660-n/a. https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.14660

  Zhang, Y., Yang, Y., Yang, Y., Li, J., Xin, W., Huang, Y., Shao, Y., & Zhang, X. (2019). Alterations in Cerebellar Functional Connectivity Are Correlated With Decreased Psychomotor Vigilance Following Total Sleep Deprivation. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 134. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.00134