Ever woke up in the morning, cranky, tired, and exhausted? Spent a night of continuous tossing and turning in your bed, waiting for the sleep to set in? Sleep is an essential part of our routine and necessary resting time for the body to recuperate and heal. Sleeping on time and rising early is something that we have always heard, but how many of us follow it as dedicatedly as we should? Sleep deprivation causes physical and mental incapacities and causes bodily harm in more ways than we know. Let us look at how the body is affected and what it tries to tell us when it is subjected to irregular sleep patterns.

1. Affects your respiratory system

Affects your respiratory system

Lack of sleep directly affects your breathing mechanisms and causes disturbance to your usual cycle of respiration. When you lack sleep or wake multiple times at night, you subject yourself to a phenomenon known as obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is an escalating sleep disorder that interrupts your breathing at regular intervals, causing nightmares and causing you to wake up. It subjects your body to constant colds, flu, and wheezing. As the disorder progresses, it makes your body vulnerable to lung disorders, making it difficult to correct at a later and more advanced stage.

2. Digestive disorders

Digestive disorders

Lack of sleep or abnormal sleep patterns leads to put pressure on your digestive system and cause its function incorrectly. It is also the primary reason for weight gain, obesity, and stress eating. Let us tell you how. When we sleep, two hormones in our body get affected, namely leptin and Ghrelin. Leptin and Ghrelin control our feelings for hunger and fullness. The malfunction of these hormones causes a person to overeat and snack at odd times in the day. Leptin tells your brain you’ve had enough to eat, but without sleep, Ghrelin, which is an appetite stimulant, tells your mind that it isn’t full.

3. The strain on the heart

The strain on the heart

Sleep plays a vital role in managing our natural flow of functions that its supposed to do. Sleeping well plays a crucial role in keeping your heart healthy and of sound service. When you get adequate sleep, your heart and blood vessels, blood sugar, vessel inflammation, and blood pressure in complete control. When your body is well-rested, it ensures that your blood vessels in the heart heal and repair themselves well.

4. Dumbs down your senses

Dumbs down your senses

The inability to sleep well affects our senses in a significant way throughout the day while doing different activities. Since lack of sleep makes you tired and exhausted, it also renders you mentally inadequate. Cognitive processes like critical thinking and reasoning, decision making, problem-solving, and the general state of awareness is affected in an adverse manner. This makes concentrating on day to day tasks difficult and makes you strain and overwork your brain, a brain that is already tired and unable to process to its maximum capacity.

5. Accidents

Accidents

Fatigue is a product of a person’s inability to sleep properly and adequately. Fatigue triggers many mistakes and troubles as you progress through your day. Statistically, it has been proved that a fatigued person causes road accidents twice as much as a healthy person who has had enough sleep. Pilots, drivers, or even daily commuters need enough sleep and rest to keep them from being critically fatigued. Since you go against your body clock by not letting your body rest, you never know when the body gives up and cause accidents. Due to reflexes being diminished because of lack of sleep, it makes disasters more inevitable.

Everybody needs rest. To heal, rejuvenate, and repair itself from external and internal factors that affect it on a routine basis. When the body doesn’t get its rest, it is basically going against the law of nature and its body clock. It begins to cause problems. Solution: Get enough sleep, stay healthy, and happy.