Heed These Warnings! THIS Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep!

Our sleep is superfood for the head. We now know how important sufficient sleep is for physical and mental regeneration. Lack of sleep can literally make you sick, but not only that. Too little sleep over a longer period of time causes stress to our body. It reacts to this with feelings of ravenous hunger, which sooner or later causes us to gain weight. We become unfocused, and our performance in everyday life gradually declines.

One area, however, that orthodox medicine has long overlooked in connection with sleep is its merit as far as our brain is concerned. Of course, we notice that lack of sleep makes us less mentally fit. But our brain suffers much more than that when we deprive it of much-needed rest at night. In this article we’d like to share five of the biggest disadvantages of sleep deprivation for our brain.

1. Your memory breaks down.

The most important stage of a night's rest is the REM phase. This is the all-important deep sleep that literally sets our body, mind and emotional world back in order overnight. Our memories occupy a special neurological position here. They, too, can only manifest themselves in our mind if we spend sufficient time in deep sleep each night.

For one study, test subjects had to learn new tasks and social games during the day and rehearse new techniques. The following night, they were alternately woken up in the middle of REM or not. On days when deep sleep had been interrupted, the study participants had difficulty remembering what they had learned the day before.

Science therefore clearly recommends: on days when an important exam or test is due, the night before should definitely be spent sleeping instead of cramming. No one is better at jogging our memory than deep, undisturbed REM sleep.

2. Your reaction time shortens.

Even the researchers who designed and conducted the sleep studies were surprised by this point. Here, the subjects were only cheated out of two hours of sleep at night. They were allowed to sleep only six hours instead of the usual eight. The results of the tests the next day were sobering.

A simple reaction game in which buttons had to be pressed according to instructions was a real challenge for most of the participants. Despite six hours of sleep, their brains showed clear phases of suspension, as is the case with microsleep. In this case, our brains literally blink out of the state of consciousness, trying to catch up on winks, and that with only two hours of sleep deficit.

Anyone who drives a car or operates heavy machinery, does hard physical work or performs other major activities after such nights is probably not even aware of this disadvantage. Yet studies like this prove that when it comes to sleep, every hour really does count.

3. You lose your sense of humor.

Now this finding may be surprising; after all, we humans tend to think of humor as a stable matter of character. Researchers at the prestigious Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland wanted to find out for sure. They deprived a group of subjects of sleep. The control group was allowed to rest as usual throughout the night. The next day, both teams were presented with funny comics and jokes.

What happened: The group that was able to sleep through the night had sufficient fun with this task. Those participants who had been condemned to a poor night’s rest did not understand most of the jokes shown to them. The scientists even went one step further: they administered copious amounts of caffeine to the sleepless group and scheduled a second round of the experiment.

The results were not appreciably different from the first. Their sense of humor had apparently been lost overnight. Even the simplest and most easily understood jokes and cartoons met with mere incomprehension. But taken a little more broadly, the results of this study can tell us something else. Not only do we seem to become less receptive to humor when we get too little sleep. Our interest decreases in general, as far as stimuli from the outside are concerned.

Anyone who has ever had to get through a day without sleep, even if it only involved pleasant things like celebrating and socializing, knows how dampened our enjoyment of such events then becomes. We experience everything as if through a thick veil and feel only half present, if at all.

4. Your attention wanes.

Sleep deprivation can bring many nasty side effects. Probably the worst form of this handicap is the infamous microsleep while driving. Studies have impressively shown that the attention span of people after 24 hours without sleep was as impaired as with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%. The simplest activities were then justifiably difficult for the study participants.

Needless to say, in this state no one should be driving a vehicle, operating machinery or performing any other responsible activity. In these stressful situations, many people tend to take stimulants, coffee or energy drinks. Although these make us more alert in the short term, they only intensify the physical symptoms of stress in the long term.

Our blood sugar level goes on a roller coaster, our hormones get out of control and, as a result, a restful night's sleep is out of the question. Once this vicious circle has begun, the body and psyche can suffer serious damage.

5. Your emotional life suffers.

It's not just our bodies and psyches that suffer from lack of sleep. We even subject our emotions to a real roller coaster ride by not allowing ourselves enough healing sleep. In addition to the familiar symptoms such as irritability and significant mood swings, longer periods without a good night's rest can even promote depression. But that's not all: studies have shown that sleep deprivation literally floods our bodies with stress hormones.

This process impairs our emotional intelligence and increases our tendency to shirk our own responsibilities and blame others. Furthermore, we lose the ability to solve even simple problems. The shortened rest period even reduces our self-esteem, our empathy and ultimately even puts dents in our impulse control. Study participants who were required to stay awake for nearly 60 hours showed a clinically significant increase in signs of paranoia, depression, and anxiety.

Today’s Conclusion

Don’t make sleep a headache and a heartache all in one. Getting enough sleep is sometimes easier said than done. Nevertheless, we should not take sleep lightly. All of our body's regeneration processes take place at night. Our emotions suffer, even our compassion is lost if we are not allowed to get a sufficient night's rest.

The fact that our ability to concentrate suffers and our ability to react is severely impaired probably comes as no surprise. In this context, however, lack of sleep can have a particularly devastating effect on our lives. The risk of causing a traffic accident increases significantly. But even as pedestrians, we should be careful to remain reasonably alert. The most interesting thing is certainly the fact that we lose our sense of humor at the same time as we lose deep sleep.

So we actually don't find it a laughing matter if someone or something constantly prevents us from sleeping. Irritability in the morning and moody behavior throughout the day don't really make things any better. The philosopher and scholar Immanuel Kant summed up the strong connection between us humans and our well-deserved sleep: "Three things help to bear the hardships of life: hope, sleep, and laughter."