Insomnia effects

This article is addressed to those who think that trading a few hours of deep sleep for watching television, playing video games, or reading a book is really justifiable. Remember the fact that many cases of insomnia are habit driven. So we focus on the ill effects of insomnia or habitual sleep deprivation on your body.

1)    Cognitive impairment: Go back to that last time when you woke through the night and then look at your mental status the next day. There is decreased mental function during the day time- difficulty in recalling things, difficulty in concentrating, difficulty in getting new ideas etc. Thus insomniacs are chronically deprived of their day time mental faculties.

2)    Impairment of motor skills: A sleepless night has the same effect on a person as drinking too much beer. You begin to have slowing of reflexes, you take too much time to respond to a given situation such as while driving a car. You also have a tendency to fall asleep while driving or doing any monotonous job. So does your life or a limb or two count above a night of sleep, I think not.

3)    Metabolic problems: studies conducted in this field have shown that chronic insomnia is associated with higher incidence of obesity and diabetes. These are the part and parcel of high status of living and by sleeping less you are giving them an extra reason to rear their heads. Obesity in itself is not just a problem of weight, it is associated with multiple other diseases primarily the coronary artery disease. So indirectly, being an insomniac invites heart attacks. Diabetes is an incurable disease characterized by inability of the body to deal with the glucose in your diet. This leads to multiple problems, ultimately leading to decreased quality of life and an untimely death. So by not sleeping well you are inviting diabetes despite a healthy diet.

4)    Decreased immunity: your body is constantly fighting with the environment you live in. the bacteria, viruses, inert materials such as dust, the food you eat etc. to deal with these the body has an efficient immune system. For this system to function well, it has a few prerequisites and one of them is good sleep. This is so because lack of sleep is a stressful condition and stress causes release of cortisol in your body from the adrenals. Cortisol has an anti inflammatory effect, the byproduct of which is loss of immunity. Thus you start falling easy prey to diseases which earlier wouldn t touch you.

Thus sleep is a very important part of your daily routine, maybe more than you earlier knew.