Sleep is the foundation of your health.

Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective.

Every major system, tissue, and organ of your body suffers when sleep becomes short.

No aspect of your health can retreat at the sign of sleep loss and escape unharmed.

Like water from a burst pipe in your home, the effects of sleep deprivation will seep into every nook and cranny of biology, down into your cells, even altering your most fundamental self – your DNA.

Sleep deprivation impacts our major physiological systems in our human body: cardiovascular, metabolic, immune and reproductive.

As we approach midlife, our body begins to deteriorate and health resilience starts to decline, the impact of insufficient sleep on the cardiovascular system escalates.

Adults 45+ who sleep fewer than six hours per night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared to those getting more than eight hours per night.

This emphasizes how important it is to get sleep at this age – but unfortunately the time when family and professional circumstances encourage us to do the exact opposite.

Part of the reason the heart suffers so dramatically under the weight of sleep deprivation concerns blood pressure. With just little sleep loss can pump up pressure in the veins of your entire body, stretching and distressing the vessel walls, is very alarming.

One or two hours of sleep reduction can speed up the contracting rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour.

The less you sleep the more you eat.

 

In addition, your body becomes unable to manage those calories effectively, especially the concentrations of sugar in your blood.

Inadequate sleep decreases concentrations of the satiety hormone leptin and increases the hunger hormone ghrelin.

People are being punished twice for the same offense of short sleep, once by having the “I’m full” signal removed from their system, and once by gaining the “I’m still hungry” feeling being amplified. As a result, participants just don’t feel satisfied by food when they are short sleeping.

From a metabolic perspective, the sleep restricted participants had lost their hunger control.

“A sleep deprived body wil cry famine in the midst of plenty” – Van Cauter

As study completed – one group had four nights of eight hours sleep and another group had four and half hours per sleep over the four nights. They were limited to the same amount of physical exercise per day and were given free access to food. The researchers counted their food calorie intake and studies showed:

•  300 more calories were eaten each day by those who had short sleep

Similar changes occur if people only get 5 to 6 hours sleep over a ten day period.

Scale this up to a working year, and consider 4 weeks of holidays within the year where you get good sleep, you’ll have consumed 70,000 extra calories and could cause 5-8 kg weight gain a year .

Sleep loss increases chemicals that are very similar to cannabis (endocannabinoids), and like marijuana se, these chemicals stimulate appetite and increase your desire to snack (munchies).

Combine this and alterations in leptin and ghrelin caused by sleep deprivation and you have a potent brew of chemical messages all driving you in the one direction: overeating.

Some argue that we eat more when we are sleep deprived because we burn extra calories when we stay awake, but sadly, this is not true.

The less you sleep the less energy you feel you have, the more sedentary and less willing to exercise.

Inadequate sleep is the perfect recipe for obesity; greater calorie intake, lower calorie expenditure.

The encouraging news is that getting enough sleep will help you control body weight. A full night’s sleep repairs the communication pathway between deep-brain areas that unleash hedonic desires and higher-older brain regions whose job it is to rein in these cravings.

Ample sleep can therefore restore a system of impulse control within your brain, putting the appropriate brakes on potentially excessive eating.

Plentiful sleep makes the gut happier. Sleep’s role in redressing the balance of the body’s nervous system, especially calming of the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch, improves the bacterial community known as your microbiome, which is located in your gut.

When you don’t get the sleep you need, the nervous system triggers an excess of circulating cortisol that cultivates “bad bacteria” to fester throughout your microbiome. As a result, insufficient sleep will prevent the meaningful absorption of all food nutrients and cause gastrointestinal problems.

Make next year all about sleep.