Sleep contributes to general health, cognition and memory, and performance. Read on to learn how sleep deprivation affects all areas of your life.
1) Cognition and Memory:
- Before learning: If your brain is too tired, it is harder to take information in to store and use later. For example, if you’ve ever been sleep deprived in class or a meeting, you probably didn’t retain the information as well.
- After learning: During sleep, your brain refines and improves upon the memories of the skills and information that you learned during the day through a process called “consolidation”. Brain connections are strengthened, and information is shuffled to different parts of the brain so that the memory is stable and useful to you. This process is disrupted if you don’t sleep enough.
- Evidence: In one study, researchers trained a group of people to perform a cognitive task. After the training, one group was deprived of sleep for 30 hours and one group was not. After two days of recovery sleep, both groups were retested. The performance of the sleep deprived group never caught up to that of the control group, because sleep immediately following the training was necessary for learning.
2) Performance:
- Sleep deprivation increases your body’s need for sleep which can make it difficult to remain alert and vigilant
- Similar to a drunk driver, you may be impaired as a result of sleep deprivation but not even realize it
3) General Health: Chronic sleep deprivation contributes to:
- Mood and attentional changes
- Overeating and weight gain: sleep deprivation has negative effects on hunger hormones
- Increased risk of getting sick: sleep deprivation weakens your immune system
- Chronic disease such as high blood pressure and diabetes
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