Top Nine Reasons Why You Should Be Prioritizing Sleep

Seems like everywhere you look there is some kind of news flash about how important sleep is. Maybe it’s an ad for the latest fitness tracker that measures how much REM sleep you get. Maybe it’s your physician telling you that you could lower your blood pressure if you got a few more ZZZs … or your mom sending you some kind of link about how getting eight hours of sleep is the best way to get better grades or a career advancement. No matter where you see it, it seems like some kind of conspiracy against the good time of staying up and binge-watching television series or late night partying. But if you listened to a recent Inquiring Minds podcast of UC Berkeley sleep researcher Matt Walker, you got an earful about how not getting the sleep you need can impact your life. Walker says, “Sleep is a time of immense benefit for your body. Every one of the basic homeostatic systems within your body take a huge hit after just one night of short sleep.”

In case you didn’t hear the show, here are the top nine takeaways:

No matter how strong and special you think you are, you still need eight hours of sleep. We like to tell ourselves that the rule is for people who are sick, or weak, or inferior to us, but that’s actually a sign of sleep deprivation, which impairs your ability to judge how you’re feeling. “Your subjective sense of how well you’re doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of objectively how you actually are doing. As soon as you get less than seven hours of sleep, it’s very easy for us to measure impairments in your brain function and in your body functions,” Walker says.

100 years ago, people got at least nine hours of sleep. It’s very hard to tell how much sleep people today are actually getting because everybody has a different sense of it (unless they’re using sleep monitors), but it’s pretty clear that the national average falls far below eight hours per night, and that represents a big change from the previous century. “That short-sleeping that we’re now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. Its not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.” Walker attributes a lot of the change to technology, pointing to everything from electricity to the Internet.

Short sleep equals a slower metabolism. Some people may kid themselves into thinking that if they’re up late, they’re burning more calories, but studies have repeatedly shown a number of metabolic messes. Skipping sleep impairs the body’s ability to metabolize carbohydrates and interrupts the normal production of the hormones that control our hunger, our judgment, and our cravings for unhealthy foods.

Sleep deprivation makes you more vulnerable to illness. According to Walker, “If I give you just four hours of sleep for one night, your immune system function is impaired by about 70 percent, so there’s a catastrophic implosion of your immune system health.” Need more evidence? Think about how often you get sick or catch a cold when you’ve let yourself get run down, or when you’re returning from an overseas trip and experience jet lag.

Short sleep increases your cancer risk. Scary, but true. Research has shown that the less sleep you get, the more you decrease the amount of cancer-fighting cells that are in your body. In fact, the World Health Organization has recently labeled night-shift work a “probable carcinogen.” On top of that, the inverse is true – studies have shown that the more sleep cancer patients get, the greater chance they have of having their therapeutic treatments work more effectively.

Lack of sleep makes it hard to remember things.

Lack of sleep can impair memory

There are a number of ways that getting the right amount of sleep helps you learn things, and that not getting sleep actually works against you. According to Walker, sleep “seems to refresh and restore the learning circuits within your brain,” which helps get you ready to learn. Additionally, it helps you remember what you have learned, and store it in your memory for future use. Sleep “cements those new files into the neural architecture of the brain so that you don’t forget.”

Not only does sleep help you learn, it also helps you understand. Have you ever had the experience where you’re deadly tired and you keep reading the same page over and over again and it just doesn’t make sense to you? That should be proof enough that sleep helps you understand and lack of sleep makes it hard to understand, but there are also studies that have proved it. Turns out that during one of the stages of our sleep — slow wave sleep — there are specific electrical waves traveling back and forth between the regions of our brain. Walker says that these waves carry information back and forth, helping us make connections and sense out of what we’re seeing and hearing. He says the goal of the process is to “connect pieces of information in different parts of the brain, strengthen them, relate them together, build big tapestry frameworks of understanding. It’s the difference between knowledge, which is learning individual facts, and wisdom, which is extracting overarching understanding.”

Making up for lost sleep is harder than you think. You might think that by sleeping in a few extra hours on the weekend you can make up for the sleep time that you’ve missed during the week, but that’s not the way it works. “Sleep is not like the bank,” Walker says. “You can’t accumulate a debt during the week and then hope to pay it off later at the weekend.” Even more important, getting extra sleep isn’t going to make up for the damage that your previous sleep deprivation has caused.

The older you get, you still need the sleep. There’s a common misconception that older people don’t need as much sleep, but our sleep requirements are a constant as we age. The reason why so many people stop sleeping as long as they age is that our brains break down in the areas that control sleep. “It’s simply that older adults don’t seem to be able to generate sleep efficiently,” says Walker.