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Have you ever found yourself feeling less focused and foggy during the day after a few nights of poor sleep? That’s sleep deprivation. Not only is it hard to get through the day when you’re not getting enough sleep, but sleep deprivation can have a significant impact on your mental health, from focus to mood.
Let’s talk about why sleep is an essential pillar of your mental health and what happens when you don’t get enough. For more, check out How to Sleep Well with Depression , How to Banish Nighttime Anxiety , and What the Cognitive Shuffle Method Is .
Why is sleep important for the brain?
In general, we should all get at least once seven o’clock of sleep per night, but life can get busy, and late nights and early alarms creep in to disrupt sleep. According to the Cleveland Clinic, 70 million Americans struggling with a sleep disorder such as insomnia.
This amounts to more than just fatigue. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that lack of sleep increases your chance of experiencing mental health problems by 2.5 times.
How does sleep impact mental health in such a significant way? It all comes down to what you brain does while you rest(Hint: It’s a lot.) While you sleep, your brain does the following:
- Facilitates communication between nerve cells.
- Removes toxins.
- Processes what you learned during the day.
Without enough sleep you lose plasticity of the brainmeaning that your brain can’t adapt to stimuli the way it should. This brings us back to the connection between mental health and sleep. If your brain can’t make memories or learn new things, you’re not going to feel great mentally.
6 Ways Lack of Sleep Affects Mental Health
Let’s look at the specific ways sleep deprivation leads to mental health problems.
1. Mood swings
Long-term sleep deprivation negatively impacts your ability to regulate your emotions. You may have experienced the following scenario: You slept badly the night before and the next day you feel like you could cry or get angry at any moment.
Studies show that lack of sleep negatively impacts our mood. It can make you more prone to anger And emotionally reactive in general. These mood swings don’t just make you feel bad during your day. They can also affect your decision-making ability.
A 2017 study found that sleep deprivation makes us more sensitive to stressful stimuli and emotionally aroused. Sleep is essential to our ability to manage our emotions and daily stressors.
2. Perception of the world
When you’re not getting the sleep you need, it feels harder to interact with the world around you, because it does. Go too long without sleep and you may even start to hallucinating. Sleepless nights directly affect how you perceive what is happening around you. Lack of sleep can change the way you interpret situations and as a result, how you react to them.
Sleep also affects how we see the world. One study showed that not getting enough sleep can change the world how we see color.
3. Dealing with stress
Sleep and stress have an interesting relationship. Stress can make it harder to get quality sleep, but lack of sleep can actually make you more stressed.
A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that 21% of adults reported an increase in their stress levels when they didn’t get enough sleep. If you’re already stressed, the problem is made worse. A whopping 45% of people who reported higher stress levels at the time of the survey said that lack of sleep increased their stress even more.
Many respondents reported other stress-inducing side effects of poor sleep, including:
- Slowness (53%).
- Irritability (38%).
- Concentration problems (29%).
- Lack of motivation (25%).
4. Concentration and brain fog
Lack of sleep makes it harder for your brain to form memories, stay focused, and learn new things. That tired feeling that comes with a lack of good sleep often translates into brain fog that can disrupt your day.
If you have trouble concentrating, check your sleep habits. Research shows that lack of sleep can make you react longer and have more difficulty concentrating.
Lack of sleep has also been linked to attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The relationship between ADHD and sleep is quite complex and bidirectional: people with ADHD may experience disturbed sleep, and people who have trouble getting a good night’s sleep may experience ADHD symptoms.
5. Hormonal disruption
As we said before, sleeping doesn’t necessarily mean your body and brain are less powerful. In fact, your system uses the time you sleep to do important work. That includes a number of important hormonal processes.
More specifically, all of these hormones get to work while you sleep:
- Growth hormones.
- Melatonin (regulates your sleep-wake cycle).
- Thyroid stimulating hormone.
- Cortisol (a stress hormone).
- The hormones that influence your appetite.
Because your hormones regulate so many things in your body, many of which directly affect how you feel, this is important for both your mental and physical well-being.
The flip side of this is also true. Hormonal imbalance can cause sleep problems, a problem that is especially common in women are in menopause. If you have persistent insomnia, talk to your doctor. In some cases, correcting a hormonal imbalance can help you get consistent, quality sleep.
6. Contributing to and reinforcing mental illness
There is a clear link between lack of sleep and mental health. However, if you already have a mental health condition, or are experiencing symptoms of one, sleep is extra important.
Why? Let’s look at the cyclical relationship between sleep and a few specific mental health conditions:
- Voltage: You can’t take away fear by getting enough sleep, but rest is certainly important. Insomnia can tractor anxiety symptoms. Anxiety can in turn make it more difficult fall asleep.
- Depression: Sleep disturbances are a hallmark symptom of major depressive disorder, while insomnia increase your risk of depression.
- Seasonal affective disorder: SAD causes most people to experience depressive symptoms in the winter (although some experience it in other seasons as well). When medical professionals diagnose a person with SAD, they check for sleep problems because they are a primary symptom.
- Bipolar disorder: This condition can to wreak havoc on your sleep cycles, whether you’re having a manic or depressive episode. This is particularly bad because sleep disturbances can make your symptoms worse worse.
- Borderline personality disorder: Working on your sleep becomes extra important if you: borderline personality disorderbecause this condition increases the risk of sleep problems. However, sleep deprivation also worsens the symptoms.
If you have persistent sleep problems along with symptoms of a mental health condition, talk to a professional.
