How Sleep Affects Virtually All Aspects of Your Life!

"We don't take sleep seriously enough," says Michael J. Sateia, MD, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Service at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. "It's essential to life. If you disrupt the sleep cycle, you could face grave health repercussions throughout your body."

A nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults, found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night, are significantly more likely to be obese.

The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

You may be able to confirm, from firsthand experience, that lack of sleep impairs cognitive function. Sleep-restricted individuals have a shorter attention span, impaired memory, and a longer reaction time.

Low-quality sleep and sleep deprivation also negatively impact mood, which has consequences for learning. Alterations in mood affect our ability to acquire new information and subsequently to remember that information.

Sleep doesn't cause acne but it can affect the number of outbreaks and the severity of them. Lack of sleep certainly aggravates acne. This is a result of increased hormone levels brought on by the disturbed sleep. An increase in hormone levels increases the production of Sebum, which clogs pores, which then become infected, which, in turn, becomes acne.

Melatonin, which regulates our sleep-wake cycle, is produced at night by the pineal gland at the base of the brain, bringing on drowsiness. Melatonin also affects our sex glands.

While there is no direct relationship between slumber and better sex, a National Sleep Foundation (NSF) poll showed people's moods can be affected by the amount of shut-eye they get.

In his practice, Russell Rosenberg, PhD, director of the Northside Hospital Sleep Medicine Institute in Atlanta, says chronic sleep-loss patients report not only being too physically tired for sex, but also having decreased libido.

In a study involving 200 mostly female college students, who had little experience of video games, students were taught to play a complicated, multisensory video game in which players must use both hands to deal with continually changing visual and auditory signals. Half were tested 12 hours after the training session, and the others 24 hours later. Some were given a night's sleep before testing; others were tested the same day.

Findings indicate that although people may appear to forget much of their learning over the course of a day, a night's sleep will restore it; moreover, sleep protected the memory from loss over the course of the next day.

In other words, sleep can dramatically affect the way you live…and remember it!