How Lack Of Sleep Can Ruin Your Life

Being forced to sleep less is not an interesting experience. We have a lot of reasons to force us stay awake. We may have a night shift; we have a lot of work to do… The first effect you might recognise when forced to stay awake for a long time is fatigue, difficulty in concentration. However, the effects of sleep deprivation can be a lot more adverse than just fatigue and lack of concentration.

Effects of sleep deprivation on brain function

Researches showed that lack of sleep in general can impair brain and cognitive function. You may find yourself easy to lose control, yelling at your family members of colleagues. It’s not a personality but rather a problem that sleep deprivation has caused. It’s because lack of sleep makes the brain incapable to handle emotions and control the feelings under certain situations.

Sleep deprivation can harm body growth

For teenagers, sleep deprivation can have negative effects on their growth. Again, researches showed that lack of sleep prevent the brain from secreting growth hormones.

Sleep deprivation can slow down healing

Experiments made on lab rats showed that rats that sleep less need longer time to heal the wound than the one that have sufficient sleep.

Lack of concentration and reduced productivity

As mentioned at the beginning of the post, sleep deprivation can make it really hard to concentrate. You will also find that the productivity is greatly reduced due to the difficulty in concentration. People with sleep deprivation usually make mistake while working, especially your work follows a flow.

Microsleep and road accidents

If a person is forced to stay awake for a long time, he/she can experience a symptom called microsleep. Microsleep is the state that your brain shuts down automatically in few seconds to few minutes. It could be dangerous if you drive on the road and suddenly have a microsleep. The lack of concentration only has caused a large number of accidents per year. With microsleep, when the driver completely has no awareness of the surround environment, the outcome could be catastrophic.

Now you see that sleep deprivation can cause a lot of serious problems. Avoiding the situations that forced you to stay awake when you should stay on bed is the best way to avoid sleep deprivation’s effects. A reasonable working plan, a job change… could be the good way to avoid sleep deprivation and its severe effects.