By: Gabriella Bell

As you lie down in bed after a tiring day, maybe from being at school, sports, work, or fundraising, has it ever been more difficult to fall asleep than after a casual day where you’ve stayed home and simply just laid on the couch, watching your favorite television show? Maybe there’s a lot on your mind. Maybe your brain isn’t as tired as you’d like it to be yet. As you stay there, lying in bed and contemplating your day, you finally fall asleep.

Sleep is one of, if not the most, important bodily function, and it plays a major role in the overall health and well-being of the human body. With an excessive lack of sleep it can have several severe negative impacts on one’s physical and mental health.

Depending on the quality of sleep you receive, it can also have effects on cognitive performance, this commonly includes difficulties in concentration, making decisions (regardless if they’re important or not), reaction times, and your memory retention throughout the day. While sleep is important to improving and keeping up your physical health and cognitive performance, these things can also be heavily dependent on other aspects such as a proper and balanced nutritional intake, hydration, and physical activity.

Throughout your day, you may experience difficulties in concentration and organization of important information. While being asleep, your brain arranges and rearranges this information accordingly, which helps memorization and clear thinking. Without proper sleep, this could prove to be more difficult, and may have certain damaging effects. If you’re a student, or in a line of work where constant learning and improvement is especially important, this could most likely severely impact your productivity throughout the day, therefore leading to the possibility of not passing classes or losing that occupation in life.

Through looking into the effects on a person’s physical health and the overall impacts sleep has on it, a necessary part it plays is through hormonal regulations. This primarily relates to hormones that are produced that are designed in order to control the metabolism along with appetite. These hormones send the message of the body being hungry or full, which could lead to over or under eating. Several of these studies have further shown that poor quality of sleep can often be linked back to the development, and later diagnosis, of diabetes or obesity.

Another important thing that could be affected are the regenerative processes proceeding throughout the body, such as tissue and muscle reparation, which can help to explain how cuts, scratches, or bruises progressively heal over time. Along with this, without proper sleep, it can also prove to have negative impacts on the immune system over time, as your body may not have enough energy as it used to in order to properly distribute it and upkeep these bodily functions. Which can ultimately lead to contracting illnesses more often, or developing infections more easily.

Lack of sleep can also reflect upon the stress levels and hormones, which can interact with the emotional stability of a person while helping to reduce that stress along with regulations of mood changes. Many sleep disorders that lead to chronic sleep deprivation are commonly linked back to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. This can also be reversed, though as some people with depression and/or anxiety often experience changes regarding their quality of sleep, which can lead to the development of insomnia or other sleeping disorders. This disruption in sleep can affect the production of the hormone, melatonin. With that in mind, cases also tend to differ between people, as some with depression experience a surplus in their melatonin production, leading to oversleeping, while others may experience a decline in their melatonin levels, resulting in lack of sleeping. 

Along with all of this, without proper sleep it can create a generally irritable or exhausted mood that can result in long term impacts on your mental health and relationships within day-to-day lives (including friends, romantic partners, parents, siblings, coworkers, etc.) 

Sleep is a very fundamental human function that controls and contributes to so many aspects of our bodies and impacts us so much throughout our days. Regardless, if we recognize the beneficial impacts provided to us through sleep, by going on to recognize the importance of healthy sleeping habits and routines, this can further improve the overall quality of our lives.

For more information, please visit:

• https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about/index.html#:~:text=Quality%20sleep%20means%20you%20are,waking%20up%20during%20the%20night.
• https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2021/04/good-sleep-good-health
• https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/sleep/art-20048379
• https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-hygiene/how-is-sleep-quality-calculated