Do We NEED Sleep?

You know that awful feeling you get when you lack a good night's sleep? When your brain feels fuzzy, your body aches with fatigue and you could literally fall asleep anywhere.

In our modern fast-paced society, it's become a common struggle to get a full night's rest and while you may think that a simple cup of coffee or an occasional energy drink will cure your tiredness researchers are now finding that sleep deprivation can have a far more serious consequence on your body than you might think.

Benefits of sleep

Virtually every creature on earth sleeps as it's a vital process for our continued survival. While it may appear that sleep is simply a time for our bodies to shut down, the reality couldn't be more different. There are two main ways in which we benefit from sleep. It's vital for our physical health and our mental health. While we sleep our bodies take the time to repair and rejuvenate themselves. For example, the human growth hormone is released which allows muscles to grow, damaged tissues replaced, other hormones are produced and cells prepare themselves for the following day's activities. The brain also uses this time to sift through all of the information it has collected throughout the day. It then processes it and decides what's important and needs to be retained and what is irrelevant. It also performs physical repairs on itself as well the neurons in the brain are refreshed and restored by two different types of glial cells often thought of as the support structure of the nervous system. The first cell is called microglia cells which are responsible for removing neurons that have become old and worn out by a process known as phagocytosis. This means devour in greek. The other type of glial cells is called astrocytes which connect neurons to ensure that their structure is as efficient as possible.

What happens when we don't get enough sleep?

A study conducted in Italy looked at mammalian brains during sleeping. They noticed that in sleep-deprived brains, the glial cells were still functioning but in an elevated and seemingly uncontrolled way. Their experiments involved four test groups of mice. The results concluded that the lack of sleep seems to make you more vulnerable to illnesses such as Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain conditions. This is due to the uncontrolled microbial activity that occurred in a sleep-deprived brain. Beyond this, there are a number of other health issues that can arise. For example, if you don't get enough sleep you may start to experience memory problems, sore muscles, headaches and irritability. You may even increase your risk to get diabetes. It may lead to the rise in your blood pressure and result in you get sick more often. This is because your body is not getting the opportunity to tap into the benefits of sleep as explained earlier. Lack of sleep can also affect you mentally and lead to depression.

In conclusion, there's still a lot about sleep that we don't fully understand, however, we can conclude that its an activity we all cannot live without. Getting more sleep over time helps to reverse the effects on the brain from a few sleepless nights. Studies are continually showing that sleep disorders are linked to many other conditions and this reinforces how important it is for us to sleep well. In this day and age as perhaps more important than ever to do so but we really do need to try otherwise there could have serious consequences for our health later down the road.

Thanks for reading!