After a bad night’s sleep, just getting through the day can feel like wading through treacle. And it’s not surprising. According to research, poor sleep can affect almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives: from our morning commute and performance at work to our post-work gym session and even our prowess between the sheets.
And just a small shortfall in our daily sleep quota can have an impact.
“You might feel the most immediate effects of poor sleep in the general demise of your ability to function effectively throughout the day. You might find it hard to concentrate, feel cranky, over-emotional or stressed,” says Jade Wells, a physiologist at Nuffield Health.
“In our daily lives, we may experience [sleepiness] as a general fatigue, lack of motivation, or even the experience of nodding off. Over time, this can takes its toll on perception and judgment resulting in reduced efficiency and productivity, as well as an increased risk of making errors at work, and having accidents.”
Here are just a few of the ways last night’s late night could be sabotaging your day.
One study found that moderate sleep deprivation (staying awake for 17 to 19 hours) produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication.
Research suggests poor sleep could be a contributing factor. A study on the connection between sleep and self-esteem found that short sleep duration was related to lower optimism and self-esteem when compared to those sleeping seven to eight hours.
The study, led by Christoper Nissen at the University of Freiberg Medical Center last month [August 2016] shows for the first time that sleep resets the build-up of connectivity that takes place over the course of the day in the human brain – a process crucial for our grey matter to remember and learn.
It was found that loss of a single night’s sleep was enough to block the brain’s natural reset mechanism, causing neurons to become muddled with electrical activity and unable to lay down new memories.
One study of students found that the longer participants stayed awake, the more likely they were to show dramatic changes in energy, speech patterns and pronunciation.
The researchers analysed 94 men and 70 women, of an average age of 30, by giving them a wrist-mounted sleep sensor to track the quantity and duration of their sleep each night for a week.
According to researchers, sleep could be key to seeing the best results from your CrossFit workout. One study found that sleep debt damages muscle physiology and impairs muscle recovery because of increased stimulation of protein degradation, which impairs protein synthesis and decreases muscle mass.
Meanwhile, a 2015 study by the University of Michigan Medical School looked at the sleep and sex patterns of 171 female college students for 14 days, concluding that every extra hour of sleep the women received made them 14% more likely to engage in sex.