Sleep Deprivation and Its Affect On Our Bodies

 By: Kyle Arnold

When students reach the college level and step into the work world afterwards, they tend to lose sleep due to a certain number of reasons. It could be due to stress, insomnia, depression etc. 

It also doesn’t help that people have sacrificed time to sleep in order to give their attention to completing other tasks. Whatever the reason, it has been suggested that lack of sleep can lead to negative impacts on the body. This article is meant to prove or disprove those claims and to see why it happens if they are. 

As mentioned before, lack of sleep has been suggested to be linked to mental health decline. It has also been suggested to lead to problems in other parts of the body like the immune system or the cardiovascular system, as well.

We spoke with Dr. Cassandra Baldwin, a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, about if it is true that sleep deprivation can have this kind of effect. She started by talking about how it can impair motor skills.

“Motor control is compromised when you’re not getting enough sleep thanks to weakened communication between different brain areas,” Dr. Baldwin said.

This mainly happens because the brain is trying its hardest to keep you awake. While its focus is somewhere else, the brain will have trouble with keeping you running smoothly.

Afterwards Dr. Baldwin mentioned that there is also research that found that the cardiovascular system is weakened while the body suffers from sleep deprivation. This can lead to a 20% higher chance of experiencing a heart attack, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

It has also been found that sleep deprivation does have a link to mental health decline. There were studies that featured 21 to 30 year olds that found that people who had insomnia were four times as likely to develop depression in the following three years, according to Harvard Health Publishing.

The decline in mental health is also a factor to sleep deprivation which leads to further mental health decline. Dr. Baldwin as able to corroborate those findings.

The mental health decline from sleep deprivation can to lead to worse sleep and one way is from anxiety. When you’re anxious or experiencing stress, your fight or flight response is activated, so adrenaline is always getting released to your brain to keep it awake, according to Dr. Baldwin.

The adrenaline rush keeps you awake because the brain believes that a threat is around that you should be wary of.

So why do people fall into sleep deprivation? Most of the time people have lost sleep by their own hands. Like mentioned before some people sacrifice sleep in order to complete other tasks.

“I feel I don’t get enough sleep because I work late, and then when I get home I have to get all of my homework done,” Allison Mcmillen, a Georgia Southern University student majoring in physics, said. “After that I usually review what I did in my class that day as well.”

There are also some cases where they can’t control it. An example would be insomnia or sleep apnea which are big problems to people who are inflicted by those conditions.

Sleep insomnia is a sleeping disorder that makes it hard for someone to sleep or stay asleep during the night, as defined by the Cleveland Clinic. About 1 in 3 of adults worldwide have shown its symptoms. Sleep apnea is when one’s breathing stops and starts several times during sleep.

When asked about sleep insomnia, Dr. Baldwin claimed that it is mainly caused due to stress in their daily lives. Then sleep apnea is caused because the brain feels like it isn’t getting enough oxygen. This is mainly caused by a blockage in the airway or something going wrong in the brain.

In order to avoid sleep deprivation problems, it has been recommended that the correct amount of sleep is about seven to nine hours. When asked about the accuracy of those claims, Dr. Baldwin stated that it is true, but there are some special cases where people can function with less.

“Those are special cases and that usually requires a different brain system or special genes,” Dr. Baldwin said.

If you’re someone that doesn’t get the best sleep, it is mainly due to the amount of light that we let in when it is almost time to sleep.

“If there’s a lot of light in the environment, that tells our brains that we should be awake,” said Dr. Baldwin.

Outside of medical conditions like sleep apnea and insomnia, screentime before bed is the main perpetrator of this and Dr. Baldwin suggested that people should read a physical book instead. If people need their screentime, it was suggested to use yellow light filters or a darker screen in order to limit the light.