We’ve all heard that sleep is important, but what does that really mean on a day-to-day basis? Turns out poor sleep affects every aspect of your health and well-being - slowing your mind, damaging your body and unsettling your emotions. If you’re missing out on healthy sleep, or only getting poor rest, here are four important aspects that will improve when you commit to making sleep a priority.
Appearance
You’ve heard the term “beauty sleep.” Your appearance communicates, at a glance, your overall health. Good sleep provides essential maintenance that optimizes your well-being and, thus, the way you look through a variety of mechanisms. Your body drops its core temperature during sleep by increasing blood flow to the skin. This helps remove waste products and stimulates production of proteins like collagen while facilitating the generation of new skin cells. As a result, sleep deprivation causes drooping of eyelids and the corners of the mouth, eyes that appear redder, swollen and more sunken, paler skin and more defined wrinkles. This general puffiness is reduced by the production of a variety of anti-inflammatories as you sleep.
Quality sleep can help ward off the common cold and enhances the effectiveness of vaccines, keeping you feeling and looking your healthiest. Healthy sleep habits can reverse the damage done by late nights, even in some extreme cases. For example, in one study, the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea resulted in patients appearing more alert, youthful and attractive to their peers. By getting plenty of sleep, you give your skin a chance to rejuvenate itself and allow your body the rest it needs to manage inflammation, fight off infections and keep you looking your absolute best.
Physique
Good sleep also helps you maintain a healthy physical appearance. Joint aches, muscle tension and body pain are some of the most obvious symptoms of chronic sleep loss, as is an expanding waistline. Quality sleep balances the hormones that are associated with feelings of satiation and appetite - leptin and ghrelin, respectively. Poor sleep leads to reduced levels of leptin, increased levels of ghrelin, more eating over the course of the day and, eventually, a higher body mass index. What’s worse, sleep deprivation causes your brain to prefer higher calorie junk food over more nutritious alternatives, promoting insulin resistance. This effect raises the risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome. Committing to healthy sleep can not only reverse the short term metabolic effects of poor sleep but, in some cases, treatment of a chronic sleep disorder like obstructive sleep apnea can actually lower blood pressure and cholesterol.
Quality rest is tied directly to the biological processes that control your weight and appetite as well as those responsible for physical performance and recovery. Exercise is also influenced by quality sleep, which lowers the perceived effort of cardiovascular activity and facilitates the recovery of muscles via growth hormone production during deep non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Restful sleep is an essential component of any fitness program; in many respects, missing sleep is the opposite of exercise!
Mind
The benefits of sleep extend to your mental performance as well. If you’ve ever felt foggy after a poor night of sleep, or maybe required an extra cup of coffee to get going in the morning, you’ve experience the effects of sleep loss on your mind. Good sleep allows the brain’s recently elucidated waste disposal network to clear out the byproducts of metabolism that accumulate during waking hours, keeping your grey matter fresh and potentially preventing neuronal loss leading to dementia such as Alzheimer’s Disease. Even a single night’s lost sleep can limit your ability to perform basic arithmetic and impairs your reactions times just as much as alcohol intoxication.
A habit of good sleep preserves your ability to pay attention, make sound decisions and deal with complex concepts. Indeed, your working memory, the short term storage you tap for immediate tasks (think RAM on a computer), is limited by chronic sleep loss, as is your ability to organize and form long term memories (similar to a computer’s hard drive), a process long thought to rely on the natural activity of REM and deep NREM sleep. These impairments in memory make it harder for you to learn new things, impacting performance at school, work, and even in sports. If you lose enough sleep, your brain will try to reclaim some of that rest through microsleeps, barely detectable periods of mental lapse that, over time, transition into longer bouts of unintended sleep. By getting enough sleep, you give your brain the chance to clean up and organize, leaving you sharper and quicker every day.
Personality
Sleep is an essential part of what makes you unique, without it you aren’t really yourself. Your brain perceives lack of sleep as a stress, a deviation from your natural state of being, and adapts by forcing you to perceive and respond to the world from a position of anxiety and want. Losing sleep can make you more fearful of perceived future difficulties, keeping you from tackling important tasks. Sleep naturally reduces levels of cortisol, a potent stress hormone, making you less anxious in general and preventing you from overreacting to daily obstacles.
Good sleep also helps you recognize moral (and immoral) behaviors in others and, more importantly, yourself. You’ll also be more likely to pick up on subtle facial and behavioral cues that clue you in to the true intentions of others, while also boosting your nonverbal communication skills. Remember, getting enough sleep helps you keep your cool and navigate the daily personal and professional obstacles in your family and work lives. Taking time to rest makes everything easier!
Sleep has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of your life. If you aren’t already in the habit of maximizing the potential of sleep, it’s not too late! Focus on making time to sleep, avoiding the things that keep you up at night. If you think you may have a sleep disorder, consider seeking treatment now. Once you add healthy sleep back into your life you’ll see improvements just about everywhere you look.