10 signs you need more sleep

By Dr. Mercola    May 18, 2017

1. You Always Feel Hungry

Lack of sleep influences hormone levels, including increasing the "hunger hormone" ghrelin and decreasing leptin, which is involved in satiety. By activating your endocannabinoid system, which is involved in modulating appetite and food intake, sleep deprivation can even give you the munchies, similar to marijuana use.

2. You've Gained Weight

One of the consequences of eating more when you're sleep deprived is weight gain, although lack of sleep also promotes metabolic dysfunction that further fuels weight gain. Losing as little as 30 minutes of sleep each night can disrupt your metabolism enough to cause weight gain. In fact, each half-hour of sleep debt incurred during weeknights raised one study's participants' risk for obesity and insulin resistance by 17 percent and 39 percent respectively after one year.⁴

What this means is that if you need eight hours of sleep but consistently only get seven, you may theoretically raise your risk of obesity by about 34 percent and simultaneously jack up your chances of insulin resistance — which is a hallmark of most chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes — by 78 percent.

3. Your Memory Fails You

The process of brain growth, or neuroplasticity, is believed to underlie your brain's capacity to control behavior, including learning and memory. However, sleep and sleep loss modify the expression of several genes and gene products that may be important for synaptic plasticity.

Furthermore, certain forms of long-term potentiation, a neural process associated with the laying down of learning and memory can be elicited in sleep, suggesting synaptic connections are strengthened while you slumber.

4. It's Difficult to Make Decisions

Sleep deprivation leads to accidents both big and small, some of which prove to be fatal, in part because it leads to blunted reaction times and difficulty making decisions. Participants in one study underwent two nights of total sleep deprivation followed by two nights of recovery sleep, then performed a decision-making test.⁵

A well-rested control group (who had slept normally) performed better on the tests than the sleep-deprived group, but, worse yet, when the test rules were reversed none of the sleep-deprived volunteers got the right answer, even after 40 tries, leading the study's lead author to state their ability to take in new information was "completely devastated."⁶

5. Your Reaction Time Slows

In the aforementioned study, the researchers concluded that sleep deprivation is particularly problematic for decision-making involving uncertainty and unexpected change. This leads to blunted reaction times that can have tragic consequences while you're driving or on the job.

6. You're Overly Emotional

Lack of sleep kicks your emotions into high gear, which means you're likely to overreact when expressing emotions like fear and anger. Your brain's frontal cortex, for instance, plays a key role in the regulation of emotions, and sleep is vital for its function. Not to mention that research shows even one night of too little sleep may lead to unwanted behavior at work the next day, such as acting rude toward co-workers, theft or going home early without notifying the boss.⁷

7. You're Always Getting Sick

Sleep deprivation has the same effect on your immune system as physical stress or illness,⁸ which may help explain why lack of sleep is tied to an increased risk of numerous chronic diseases and acute illnesses like colds and flu. In fact, research shows adults who sleep less than six hours a night have a four times higher risk of catching a cold when directly exposed to the virus than those who get at least seven hours.⁹

Sleeping less than five hours per night resulted in a 4.5 times higher risk. The study found that sleep was more important than any other factor when it came to protecting against the cold virus, including stress levels, age and smoking. In short, if you want your immune system to be at its best, adequate sleep is essential. The researchers, writing in the journal Sleep, explained:¹⁰

"Growing evidence demonstrates that short sleep duration (< 6 or 7 h/night) and poor sleep continuity are associated with the onset and development of a number of chronic illnesses, susceptibility to acute infectious illness, and premature mortality. Experimental evidence in animals and humans suggests that the immune system serves as a key biological pathway.

For instance, total and partial sleep deprivation in humans results in modulation of immune parameters critical to host resistance, including diminished T cell proliferation, shifts in T helper cell cytokine responses, decreases in natural killer (NK) cell cytotoxicity, and increased activation of proinflammatory pathways."

8. Your Vision Seems Unfocused

Even your vision is affected by lack of sleep. According to Health, when you're tired your ciliary muscle, which helps your eyes focus, will not work up to par and "the extraocular muscles, which move the eye from side to side and up and down, may start to track improperly, resulting in double vision."¹¹ So, if you seem to be having trouble seeing after a night of little sleep, it's probably not in your imagination.

9. Your Physical Appearance Suffers

Lack of sleep affects your physical appearance significantly, in part because it alters your hormonal balance, which can lead to acne, and decreases collagen production, which may increase the appearance of wrinkles.

Further, one study took photos of 23 people with the same hairstyles, facial expressions and bare (no makeup) skin. The only difference between them was the amount of sleep they'd had—one group had a full night's sleep while the other group had been awake for 31 hours straight and then slept for just five hours.

Not surprisingly, when the photos were shown to a separate group of people, they rated the sleep-deprived group as less healthy, less attractive and more tired, suggesting that the idea of "beauty sleep" is not just a fairy tale.¹²

10. You Nod Off During the Day

You might be able to fool your body into believing you can function normally on little sleep, but as reported in the journal Sleep, as soon as you let your guard down, overwhelming sleepiness ensues.¹³ Your body will likely cave in to these episodes of "microsleeps" or nodding off, which can be tragic depending on your line of work or if you fall asleep while behind the wheel.

In a report released by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, researchers compared driving drowsy to driving with a blood alcohol concentration considered legally drunk.¹⁴ Lack of sleep, even by one or two hours, nearly doubled study participants' risk of a car accident the following day. If sleep deprivation increased, with participants sleeping just four or five hours a night, their risk of a car crash quadrupled.¹⁵ According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety:¹⁶

^References:

• ⁴ WebMD March 5, 2015
• ^5, 13 Sleep May 1, 2015
• ⁶ NPR May 12, 2015
• ⁷ Rotterdam School of Management Discovery March 28, 2017
• ⁸ SLEEP 2012;35(7):933-940
• ^9, 10 Sleep September 2015: 38(9); 1353-1359
• ¹¹ Health March 3, 2017
• ¹² BMJ December 14, 2010; 341:c6614
• ^14, 16 AAA Acute Sleep Deprivation and Crash Risk
• ¹⁵ Newsmax December 7, 2016