Ah, sleep, Nature’s soft nurse (to steal from Shakespeare). The gift we don’t appreciate as children, and then yearn for as
adults. Few of us actually get “enough” sleep, yet we all trade off sleep for
other activities. But did you know that too little sleep can actually hurt your
body?
We have all experienced the consequences of lack of
sleep: inattention, poor judgment, irritability and much more. The actual
medical toll on our bodies caused by lack of sleep has not been well
understood, until now. New research, published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, looks at the physical damage caused by sleep deprivation.
The results are frightening.
Doctors on the faculty of the University of Surrey in the
United Kingdom studied 26 volunteers as they suffered from too little
sleep. Specifically, the research looked at changes to the genes in the blood
which control the body’s manufacturing of the building blocks that we need to
survive.
The research started off with each volunteer sleeping for
up to 10 hours a night for a week. This was pretty soft duty! Then it got real.
They spent the next week getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night. Their
blood was genetically mapped, comparing the genes before and after the sleep
deprivation.
More than 700 genetic differences were measured. These
changes were associated with stress reactions, circadian rhythms, metabolism
control, tissue inflammation and immune responses. This helps to explain
observed relationships between lack of sleep and poor health, including heart
disease, diabetes, weight gain and cognitive disorders.
What can you do with this new knowledge? Certainly, this research should be considered when planning your day. Do you want to see that movie that
starts at 10:30pm, or would you like to avoid the flu? Would you rather get up
at 5:00am to complete that assignment or plan your work better and skip the
diet next month? Our daily decisions have consequences, and this new research
drives home just how important it is to get enough sleep.
Does this mean that buying a new pillow might be a
medical expense?
No comments:
Post a Comment