You need more beauty sleep. And yes, I am saying that because you are starting to get fatter, more wrinkled, and you seem to be grumpy and sick all the time. If you think that the amount of sleep you get doesn’t have any impact on those things, you are grossly mistaken and this series of articles will show you why.
Just think for a minute about how you feel after a normal week night where you stayed up watching Grey’s Anatomy and woke up early to a blaring alarm to get to work or the gym. Now compare that to a typical weekend where you were able to “sleep in” and wake up without an alarm. If you are like just about everyone else, you feel much more rejuvenated and have more energy after getting more sleep. You probably don’t need as much coffee to get going in the morning, you feel happier, and have more energy to actually go out and do something fun or productive. Sleep deprivation and sleep debt might be one of the biggest unknown detriments to health, and ensuring enough sleep is quite possibly the most taken for granted health tactic out there. People focus on their eating habits and force themselves into the gym for subpar efforts at working out, when they might actually just benefit from forcing an extra hour or two of sleep into their daily routine. In Part One of this series, we’ll talk about sleep debt as a stress factor and the surprisingly huge impact that it has on your waistline.
A recent study published in the Journal of Epidemiology found that people sleep much less than they think - in this particular study, subjects spent around 7.5 hours a night physically in bed, but only slept for roughly six of those hours. Other studies report the average sleep time is now around seven hours a night, down from the almost nine hours that were reported in 1900. However, the previously mentioned study tells us that that the 7-hour-a-night average estimate may actually be high. This may seem trivial since you need all the time you can get during your busy day, but this low amount of sleep puts a huge amount of stress on your body.
You have probably heard of cortisol, commonly referred to as the “stress hormone.” This is somewhat accurate since high cortisol levels are associated with a high amount of stress, but cortisol is naturally occurring and is important for a number of bodily functions—so, it shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. Cortisol is heavily involved in insulin and leptin sensitivity and helps to manage the interaction between insulin and glucagon, the hormones that dictate glucose and fatty acid storage. In the morning, when you need to be alert and have lots of energy, cortisol levels are naturally high. The cortisol makes your liver release high amounts of stored glucose and fatty acids into your bloodstream to provide energy. It decreases your insulin sensitivity to allow for more free glucose and fatty acids in your bloodstream for use by your cells. This is a good thing in the morning when you need it, but a high amount of stress causes high cortisol levels throughout the day and in the evening--when cortisol levels have usually gone down and when you don’t want high blood sugars and insulin resistance.
Essentially, the effects you see from high cortisol levels are similar to what you see when you consume a high amount of carbohydrates. One night with insufficient or no sleep can make you as insulin resistant as a Type 2 Diabetic. I’m sure you’ve learned by now that insulin resistance causes you to store fat around your midsection, so it should be obvious how chronically missing out on sleep can make you fat--regardless of how well you eat or how often you work out. Compound this with the fact that high amounts of glucose in your bloodstream can result in premature aging of both your skin and internal organs. Sugar likes to bond with free-floating proteins in your body, and when these chains oxidize, they form what is called Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs). AGEs damage proteins, enzymes, hormonal surface receptors and DNA in your cells, and generally accelerate the aging process. We will talk about this more in Part Two.
Another drawback of constantly elevated cortisol is the negative impact on testosterone levels in two different ways. Cortisol competes for the same limited resources as testosterone, so if you have high levels of cortisol, you are going to see a drastic drop in the amount of testosterone you have. The body fat created by the insulin resistance contains high amounts of an enzyme called aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. On top of losing the muscle building/maintaining benefits of testosterone--which essentially makes your time at the gym less effective-- this also results in abnormally high levels of estrogen that produce things like PMS, infertility and fibroids in women, and premature prostate growth in men.
Possibly the worst aspect of the sleep-cortisol relationship is that things can get cyclical really quickly. A lack of sleep causes high cortisol, which in turn disturbs sleep, which causes the production of more cortisol. This can all lead to chronically high blood sugars and pressure, the development of metabolic syndrome/pre-diabetes, and result in all sorts of other nasty effects such as long-term memory loss and decreased sex drive. As you can see, it is a good idea to be proactive and not allow this cycle to start. Make an effort to get enough sleep before you start derailing your efforts in other areas, and to prevent the disruption of your natural cortisol cycle.
In Part Two, we will look at some other negative effects caused by a lack of sleep, and provide you with some tips to help you get more sleep and improve the quality of the sleep you already get.
Peter Bauman – Peter is a chef first and personal trainer second. With a background in the biological sciences and degree in psychology, Peter knows how to make food that tastes great and keeps you lean and healthy.