Health, Healthcare
I’m a night owl and nothing like a lark. I come alive after dark and get more achieved after everyone has gone to bed than I do during the day. Over the years I would think nothing of starting the ironing at midnight and finish at three in the morning. Slip on a DVD, nothing too taxing, you can’t take your eye off an iron for too long, I have the scars to prove it. Catch up on Grey’s Anatomy or something you would never be seen dead watching at the cinema and before you know it the ironing’s done. Uninterrupted by telephone calls, hungry kids or husband.
I never went to bed that late every evening – but I do now. Having a new challenge in your life is wonderful, you run on adrenalin, hope, and sheer hard work. That hard work often runs into the early hours of the morning as you try to fit everything in. I never believed that women could have it all – give it all maybe – but certainly not have it all. I admire and sympathise with women who are working full time, raising a family and trying to fit in time for themselves. It’s the ‘me time’ that normally goes by the wayside.
Faced with running a business and carrying out what used to be a full time job running a house and family, something has to give. It’s sleep. But what harm am I doing to my body?
Inadequate sleep is now linked to weight gain, so I can blame this rather than the fact that I am sitting on my backside most of the time in front of a computer, doing less exercise than I have in years and grabbing food on the run. We actually produce more of the appetite-promoting hormone ghrelin and less of the satiety-producing hormone leptin when we are low on sleep.
Excessive sleeplessness can result in increases in blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. It will have an impact on your metabolism, memory, reaction time and concentration. Sleep deprivation will have an effect on your ability to drive.
One report says that every hour of sleep lost leads to a drop of one IQ point. Two more points go if another hour is skipped. This means it is easy for someone with an average IQ to become borderline retarded in the space of a week. Now this explains a lot!
You are three times more likely to catch a cold if you sleep fewer than seven hours per night than if you get eight, possibly because sleep helps to regulate the body’s response to infection.
Fatigue and pain can come about through lack of sleep; this is the body’s way of telling you to slow down. Pain can then trigger difficulty sleeping which creates a vicious circle; the pain is telling you to sleep but also keeping you awake.
Chemicals in the brain cannot work correctly if you are deprived of sleep, this can lead to clinical depression. Heart health can be affected by sleep deprivation as lack of sleep increases the hormones that increase stress responses. These hormones are healthy in small doses but can be detrimental in larger doses.
The ultimate danger to health is of course death – figures. Chronically sleep deprived bodies have shorter life spans and have more health problems, and increased risk of accidents.
I believe that our fifties are the time to be seriously laying the health foundations for our future. Not getting enough sleep may not be having a visible effect now, but could quite easily be causing underlying problems for the future.
Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture because it lowers the body’s capacity to resist pain and affects the brains ability to function.
