Sleep :- A Fake Necessary Evil?

Is it true that you are getting fatter, shorter and dumber because of lack of sleep or is this all a fallacy? Answer yourselves with this article by Nandini Sinha.

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Most teenagers would strongly concur that they don’t get enough sleep- either because of an assignment they had to stay up completing after leaving it for the day before the deadline, or because staying up on a school night to binge-watch a season and a half of ‘The Office’ seemed like a great idea. Feeling lethargic and yawning periodically are some obvious symptoms of lack of sleep,but can sleeping for less than seven hours daily really be harmful to our bodies?

Sleep deprivation attacks your cognitive abilities first. Your concentration and memory will be poorer than usual, which will directly affect your grades in school, not to mention the fact that you will be more likely to nod off during lessons. Your problem-solving abilities will also be affected, as

according to an article published by The Guardian, people are more probable to be ‘more impulsive, and favour instant gratification over waiting for a better outcome’ when experiencing lack of sleep.

This is the result of the decrease in activity of your frontal lobe, which looks after your decision making and self-control abilities, which may explain why you decided to spend the night watching a new TV series instead of sleeping after having done the same the previous night. It has also been found that poor sleep affects your ability to process emotional expressions and your social skills, which again provides a reason for the fact that you seem ruder and more insensitive than usual toothers after pulling off an all-nighter.

Additionally, poor sleeping patterns have also been linked to weight gain! Lack of sleep causes the body to release more of the hormone ghrelin- a hormone which stimulates your appetite- and release less of leptin- a hormone which suppresses your appetite. Furthermore, sleeping less, even just for a few days, also increases the chances of the cells in your body to become resistant to insulin. Insulin is a hormone which encourages the glucose in your bloodstream to enter your body’s cells so they can be used to respire for energy. Therefore, if your cells become more insulin- resistant, your body will be pressurised to produce more glucose to compensate for the glucose molecules not in use. The abundant glucose in your bloodstream then makes you feel hungrier, and sends a message to your body to store more calories as fat for future use, leading to weight gain. So yes, all the carbs that you’ve been eating might not be the only reason why you’re developing a

double chin!

Finally, you might be glad to know that a consistent lack of sleep also increases your chances of suffering from a heart disease, or a stroke. Your parents weren’t just making it up to put you off your plans for watching ‘The Notebook’ for the seventeenth time at 12 am. So yes, close your textbook, shut down your laptop, switch off your phone, and put away your book on heart surgeons- give yourself a break from the world, and go to sleep for eight hours every night. The tiny voice at the back of your head is wrong, you need that sleep.

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Written By Nandini Sinha