Sleep is for the strong
It is indeed now a common custom or behavior among millennials on sleeping late at night and sometimes, still be awake when the sunlight shines on their faces in the morning.
Most people want longer waking hours due to all the world’s technological wonders that offer us continual access to entertainment and other activities on a 24/7 basis. It keeps us updated to the latest trends, resulting to our habit of cutting back on sleep.
But the question is, can the body really function well with less duration of sleep or none at all? Can we really do away with sleep or at least cut back on it? The answer is a sleepless no.
According to Philippine Council for Health Research and Development, sleep is a restorative process. It allows our body to recover from the work that it has done while awake by giving our organ systems the rest they need. While asleep, our body is in a heightened anabolic state—it produces proteins that build up our immune, nervous, skeletal, muscular, and other systems. In children and young adults, the brain releases growth hormones during sleep that are needed for proper growth and development.
Without a good night sleep, our brain can’t function properly the next day. We wake up groggy, feel sleepy, or sluggish throughout the day and we become very irritable. We also find it difficult to recall and process information and make meaningful decisions.
Evidently, sleep plays a critical role in thinking and learning. While we sleep, our neurons consolidate our spatial (i.e., information about our environment and body’s orientation in relation to space), procedural (i.e., skills and procedures), and declarative (i.e., facts and experiences) memories. They likewise transfer all new information we gathered while awake, which was initially stored in our short-term memory, into our long-term memory.
Lack of sleep hurts these cognitive processes in many ways. First, it impairs attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning, and problem solving. This makes it more difficult to learn efficiently.
Too little sleep can drastically slow the metabolism down which causes the body to use less energy for simple tasks like breathing and eating. Sleep deprivation has numerous negative consequences to the body and can lead to serious health problems such as: heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes.
When it comes to body weight, it may be that if you snooze, you lose. Lack of sleep seems to be related to an increase in hunger and appetite, and possibly to obesity. According to a 2004 study, people who sleep less than six hours a day were almost 30 percent more likely to become obese than those who slept seven to nine hours. Not only does sleep loss appear to stimulate appetite. It also stimulates cravings for high-fat, high-carbohydrate foods—which tends to lead into snacking more. Consuming more calories in the form of snacks than in any other meal is an effect brought by inadequate sleep.
Furthermore, according to Harvard Medical School studies, sleeping less than five hours a night increases the risk of death from all causes by about 15 percent. Now, it’s up to you if you want to avail that 15 percent increase and other negative consequences brought by sleeping late. The early birds really do get the worm in this one.
