Don’t Sleep on It: Your Brain on Disordered Sleep
A lack of sleep makes you feel like you’re running on fumes. That’s because your brain needs to sleep to function well.
In early 2022, 57% of Americans reported sleeping less or having a harder time falling asleep or waking up since the year prior. While suffering from poor sleep or persistent sleep problems isn’t rare, it is a big deal.
What’s wrong with the way Americans sleep?
1 in 3 U.S. adults rate their sleep “fair” or “poor.” No amount of sleep tips or tricks will help if you have a sleep disorder. In fact, 50–70 million people in the U.S. have a sleep-related disorder, most of which go undiagnosed or untreated. The two most common sleep disorders include insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).
Most people are familiar with insomnia, which involves difficulty falling or staying asleep. With OSA, your airways relax too much causing five to thirty disruptions to the sleep cycle per hour. Together, these two disorders alone stop billions of people around the world from reaching the deep, restorative sleep our bodies and brains need.
Grogginess taxes your cognitive function, memory, and mental health
Our brains are powerful but delicate: just one night of inadequate, restless sleep can change the brain on a chemical level, negatively impacting its capacity to respond to new situations. Sleeping in the next day won’t help — studies show that you can’t “catch up” on lost sleep.
Ideally, we each experience four to six distinct phases of sleep per night. Different chemicals turn on and off at specific times during these phases. This process rests our brains, powering humans’ unique capacity to use multiple complex mental abilities (such as learning, remembering, and decision-making) at the same time. It’s more difficult to make new memories and absorb new information when you haven’t recharged through high-quality rest.
Suffering from a sleep disorder also makes poor mental health more likely. Studies show that the short-term effects of sleep deprivation include increased confidence, which can result in irrational and even dangerous decision-making, as well as intensified emotions that can feel uncontrollable.
In the worst-case scenario, short-term sleep deprivation can even be deadly. Daytime drowsiness is associated with an increased risk of car crashes and workplace accidents.
Continual poor sleep has irreversible consequences on your health
Our brains rely on cycling through specific patterns, particularly stage 3 NREM sleep (also known as slow-wave or deep sleep) that allow us to recover both physically and mentally after a long day. Sleep disorders can lead to long-term sleep deprivation, which can put individuals at a higher risk for cognitive decline and dementia, as well as worsen multiple common physical illnesses.
Alzheimer’s is largely thought to be the result of a specific type of protein, known as beta amyloids, condensing in the brain and forming plaques. Research shows that high-quality sleep helps to keep levels of this potentially dangerous protein at a low level. One study estimates that up to 15% of Alzheimer’s cases could be due to long-term sleep deprivation.
By increasing levels of inflammation and raising blood pressure, disordered sleep makes other serious health conditions, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, obesity, and hypertension more likely to become more serious and expensive.
Start sleeping healthier with clinical sleep care
If you’re slogging through your days, it’s time to start taking your sleep health seriously. Dealing with sleep issues doesn’t have to feel like navigating a nightmare. Learn more about sleep health and addressing sleep disorders by visiting primasun.com.
