Wednesday, January 28, 2015

18 Important Things To Know About Being Sleep Deprived

Including how to get the sweet, sweet ZZZs you need.


There are a few different ways to get lousy sleep.



Good sleep involves duration, timing, and quality, Dr. Charles Czeisler, chairman of the board of the National Sleep Foundation and chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, tells BuzzFeed Life. What this also means is that there are several ways to get crappy sleep that can hurt your health:


1. Getting less than 6 hours a night for many nights in a row, for instance, means that you're not sleeping for as long as you need to be healthy.


2. Keeping a really erratic sleep schedule — staying up 'til 6 AM on weekends, but going to sleep at 10 PM and getting up at 6 AM on weekdays, for example. Having wildly divergent times that you go to bed and wake up can be bad for you.


3. Having your sleep interrupted throughout the night, either through a sleep disorder like sleep apnea, or through outside influences (think pets on the bed, or a TV that never goes off, or a cell phone that's beeping and booping all night long).


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When you're chronically sleep deprived, your brain doesn't work too well.


When you're chronically sleep deprived, your brain doesn't work too well.


When you get consistently bad sleep, your brain suffers. You can experience impaired learning ability, poor judgment, emotional problems, poor motor skills, and more, Dr. Timothy Morgenthaler, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, tells BuzzFeed Life. (Many of these things are the same as when you pull an all-nighter).


(Special thanks to Brian Gordon, of Fowl Language Comics!)


Brian Gordon / Fowl Language Comics / Via fowllanguagecomics.com


You don't even know how sleepy and impaired you actually are.


You don't even know how sleepy and impaired you actually are.


"If you talk to people who are chronically underslept, they perceive their sleepiness much less accurately," Morgenthaler says. "They're also not able to tell they're impaired. It's like having a bit too much alcohol — people who have a few drinks and think they can still drive safely. They're not able to tell how impaired they are."


NBC / Via awesomelyluvvie.com


Bad sleep makes your appetite go up.


Bad sleep makes your appetite go up.


There are hormones in your body — leptin and grehlin — that help regulate your appetite and your feelings of fullness after you've eaten. "With chronic sleep deprivation, the correct ratio of those hormones, and our body's response to them, gets impaired," Morgenthaler says. This can cause your appetite to go up, and your ability to tell when you're satisfied to not work as well.


FOX / Via postgradnej.tumblr.com




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