How Does Lack of Sleep Affect the Body?
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Mental Processes
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A lack of sleep famously effects your mental processes. Mood is diminished and you feel sluggish. Thinking is slower, it's harder to concentrate and there's a feeling of mental fogginess. Memory problems, too, result from lack of sleep, not only with memory recall, but with storage. During sleep, memories are transferred to long-term storage. Meanwhile, cortisol--the so-called stress hormone--elevates to rates similar to patients with depression when sleep is deprived.
Healing and Maintenance
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Body maintenance and healing take place during sleep, so a lack of it will cause problems with recovery. Meanwhile, the body without sleep has to work harder. Between that and the lack of recovery, aging is accelerated. The sleep-deprived, aging body is more susceptible to illness since sleep lack depresses the immune system.
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Weight Gain
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A specific result of sleep deprivation is weight control problems. Systems like those that tell the body when it needs food and when it should store fat are partly hormonally based. Leptin, released by fat cells, helps control feelings of being full while ghrelin, released by the stomach, lets the body know if the stomach is empty. Sleep deprived people have low levels of leptin--they don't feel satisfied--and high levels of ghrelin, so they feel hungry. The situation makes people laboring under a lack of sleep also feel they are suffering a lack of food. In a study of young men who were getting four hours of sleep per night, researchers found that the men felt they were missing 1,000 calories worth of food every day. If you are sleep-deprived, you will also have more difficulty processing carbohydrates. Glucose tolerance is abnormal, as if you are in a pre-diabetic state.
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