The Sleep-Health Connection

Sleep is the most overlooked and neglected component of a healthy lifestyle.  Why?  Because people want direct results, which usually consist of weight loss, and/or an increase in strength, and they view diet and exercise as the fastest route to achieving those goals.  Proper sleep is often viewed as an unnecessary luxury.

According the the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 35% of adults in America aren’t getting enough sleep.   Over one third!  Insomnia is a common cause of sleep deprivation, but another is simply not setting aside the time required to get a good night’s sleep. 

Ever since the invention of the electric light bulb, we have been staying up later and later, interrupting our normal sleep patterns.   The onset of the information age has accelerated it to an almost dangerous degree.  iPads, smart phones, and an endless source of tv channels have given us far too many temptations for staying up later than we should, usually watching shows that benefit us in no way other than mindless diversions. 

You can’t make this up

The best way to view a lack of sleep is this: If you don’t get enough sleep, you are never fully awake.  And you can never really make up a long term deficit of sleep.  Oh, you may get 10 hours on a weekend night and feel significantly better than you had, but the negative long term health impacts steadily accumulate, and one good night’s sleep per week ain’t gonna cut it!

Sleep less, weigh more

There are multiple reasons why people gain weight when they are sleep deprived.  For starters, insufficient sleep causes our bodies to produce higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases hunger, and lower levels of leptin, the hormone that sends signals to our brain that we are full.  This double internal double whammy results in overeating during the day, which leads to steady weight gains.

A lack of sleep can also contribute to weight gain by making you feel too tired to exercise.   In all my years as a personal trainer, the most common “excuse” for not exercising regularly was “I don’t have enough time in my day”.   While that might be true for some, in most cases, it’s not a time deficit that’s the problem.  It’s an energy deficit.  We are less productive, and less efficient with our time, because we’re tired all the time.  This lowered efficiency results in longer time required for work tasks, leaving less time for things like exercise.   

Have you ever left work, with every intention of going straight to the gym, but decided to stop at home, maybe grab a bite, and rest a few moments before you went?  How many times did you actually peel your butt off the couch and go?  You know intellectually that you will feel better after you work out, but you can’t seem to take that first step.  Chillin on the couch is soooo much easier – until you wake up a few hours later and regret it.

Even if we do find time to get to the gym, we often find ourselves going through the motions, putting forth a fraction of our maximum effort, and cutting out exercises, sets, or skipping workouts altogether because we’re simply too exhausted to go.  When you reach the point where all your workouts are “maintenance workouts”, you aren’t making a lot of progress.

Mentally Compromised

A lack of sufficient sleep can severely impact your attention level, focus, energy, and overall level productivity.   When we’re mentally fatigued, our brains are less efficient, which means it takes longer to problem solve and perform mental tasks.    People who are sleep-deprived also have more difficulty receiving and retaining information, and accessing short term memories, due to the brain’s overworked neurons.

 If you do not get sufficient sleep, you will not experience all the sleep stages, the most important of which are rapid eye movement (REM) and slow wave sleep.  These contribute to creative thinking, and the access and processing of memories.  Logical reasoning, working memory, concentration, and mathematical capacity and are all aspects of cognitive function that are compromised by sleep deprivation.

According to WebMD, reducing your nighttime sleep by as little as one and a half hours for just one night could result in a reduction of daytime alertness by as much as 32%.  If, for example, we operate at an average of 90% of our peak mental efficiency during the course of our work day when rested, that would drop our efficiency to 61%.   That means it would take us over 10 hours to complete the amount of work we could get done in 7 hours.  Just imagine what we could do with those 3 extra hours in the day!