There are plenty of reasons why we encourage our customers to get the right amount of sleep every night. It’s not just to increase our mattress sales in San Diego, you know—lack of sleep takes a wicked toll on the body and leads to more health problems than you can possibly imagine.
Let’s take a look at some of the things that happen to your body. These can start happening with one night of bad sleep alone and worsens the more sleepless nights you have!
1. Your Immune System Weakens
Your immune system is an essential part of your body. It helps fight off sicknesses and diseases by killing off bad bacteria and viruses. If you don’t get enough sleep, your immune system does not have enough energy, and this can lead to a longer recovery process once you do inevitably get sick.
There’s a reason why sick people tend to sleep more—it lets the immune system recharge!
2. You Break Your Heart
Literally! Your risk of cardiovascular diseases like atherosclerosis, heart arrhythmia, and dilated cardiomyopathy vastly increases with lack of sleep. That’s because it’s linked with unhealthy things like higher stress levels, which in turn leads to unhealthy eating habits and less motivation to exercise.
3. You Increase Your Risk of Cancer
Poor sleeping habits are connected to higher rates of multiple types of cancer like breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, and stomach cancer. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation can exhaust the cells, which helps to proliferate less than ideal cells which eventually gives way to cancerous cells.
Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, lack of sleep promotes unhealthy habits like eating junk food or being stressed, which are factors in cancer. So, lack of sleep can both directly and indirectly cause cancer.
4. You Lose Cognitive Skills
We’ve had those days in our high school and college days before. You stay up super late either studying or hanging out with your friends, then the next morning you’re wearing your shirt inside out and pouring orange juice into your cereal.
Lack of sleep affects your cognitive skills like reaction time, problem-solving, decision-making, alertness, and more.
5. Your Memory Suffers
When we sleep, our brain goes through all the old and new information in our heads. It reorganizes and stores old information while processing new information and locking it in. So, when we lack sleep, the information suddenly gets jumbled up in our heads, making it easy to forget you had a dentist appointment or that it was your partner’s birthday yesterday.
6. Your Sex Drive Depletes
Estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are all hormones that affect our sex drives, and these get massively depleted whenever we don’t get enough sleep. One bad night’s sleep is enough to ruin the mood and affect our vigor for the rest of the week!
7. You Gain Weight
If the other reasons on this list don’t bother you, this one surely should. Not only does obesity cause damage to your internal organs, but it also affects the way you live your life (e.g., not moving around as quickly, not enjoying cheat foods as much), could affect your confidence levels due to societal norms, and just shortens your lifespan overall.
It also counteracts the effects of weight loss techniques. It doesn’t matter if you’re eating healthy, exercising well, and maintaining stress levels—lack of sleep will affect your weight.
8. You Could Develop Diabetes
As you should already know, insulin is a very important hormone in the body that controls your blood sugar levels and regulates your metabolism. If we don’t produce enough insulin, we develop a debilitating disease called diabetes that damages our other internal organs. It has no cure and can only be prevented with healthy eating, lifestyle, and sleeping habits.
Research has shown that insulin resistance is at its highest point whenever a person doesn’t get 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night.
9. You’re More Accident-Prone
We’re not entirely ourselves when we’re tired. Because of that, we can become largely unaware of any dangers around us as we try to keep ourselves awake on a few hours of sleep.
This tendency can lead us straight to harm’s way. According to research, a person is three times more likely to get into a fatal car accident if they’re driving on a few hours of sleep. Additionally, it can prevent us from doing our usual activities safely, making us more likely to cut our fingers while chopping vegetables or nicking our skin when we shave.
10. Your Skin Gets Worse
If you want clear, youthful-looking skin, then the best way to do so is by getting a proper amount of sleep every night. Studies have shown that the less sleep you have, the more prone your skin is to getting fine lines, wrinkles, uneven skin tones, breakouts, and more.
Sleep is a free and more effective alternative to facelifts and injections!
Conclusion
We hope we’ve properly instilled the importance of a good night’s sleep with this article. We just want our customers to be happy and healthy, and that can’t be possible if you’re not letting your body have the proper rest it deserves! Practice proper sleeping habits by sleeping at night, having a set sleep schedule, having an ideal sleeping environment with our mattresses in San Diego, and turning off our electronics at least an hour before bedtime.