What lack of sleep does to your body? An experiment

What is SLEEP? eep is essential for physical and emotional wellbeing. Not getting enough sleep can adversely affect all body functions. Lack of sleep can seriously undermine the functioning of the immune system, exposing us to infections. It can prevent the brain from functioning normally, interfering with the ability to fight stress, resulting in anxiety. It can depress us and weaken our judgment. It can make us easily irritable. Sleep has two functions. Firstly, to allow the body to rest and replenish energy. Secondly, while we sleep, many biological systems slow down their activity. The heart rate slows down, the blood pressure decreases, the metabolism by which the body uses energy, shifts into a lower gear, and the body temperature decreases. However, this does not mean that while we sleep, important things do not happen in our body. During sleep, the cells of our body can devote themselves to self-repair and multiply. This repair work is essential to maintain a strong and healthy body, and if we do not get enough sleep, our organism is unable to perform its extraordinarily important task.

In a SLEEP study, 23 healthy men aged between 22 to 61, spent 4 nights in a laboratory. On the first 2 nights participants were allowed to sleep normally, but on night 3 they had to stay awake from 3 to 7 am, which is the sleep period most important. The next morning the activity of the cells of the immune system that fight viral infections, had decreased significantly in 18 out of 23 men. Sleep deprivation weakened their body's ability to fight infections. When the participants could sleep uninterrupted through the night, their immune system cells returned to normal levels. With this experiment, the researchers demonstrated the devastating effect of just 1 night of lack of sleep on just one system, the immune system. Now, if we extend this effect to all other systems in the body, we can see how sleep deprivation pose a serious threat to our health, especially if it occurs over an extended period of time.

​References Pierpaoli, Walter. La Chiave della Vita. Morlacchi Editore, 2007.