Growing tired of hearing how bad this night's sleep could be for us? Well, it might be worse than we thought.
We've heard time and time again that lack of sleep can lead to negative health effects, from a weaker immune system to stress and anxiety.
The immediate effects of a sleepless night are obvious: tiredness, strange appetite, bad mood.
On such days, we give up on “catching up” on sleep and usually feel better after a day or two of good rest.
However, new research has shown that just one night of poor sleep can cause negative effects that last up to 15 days.
The longitudinal studyThe study, which lasted 133 days (just over four months), used smartphones and wearable devices, as well as brain scans, to track the impact of sleep on one person's brain connectivity – this includes things like attention, memory, resting state and the influence of naturalistic stimuli.
They found that sleep disruption (even if total sleep time remains unchanged) as well as sleep deprivation can have lasting effects on memory, attention and focus.
Basically, there seems to be a lag between a bad night's sleep and its potential effects, which means the negative effects can hit us.
Namely, concentration tends to deteriorate in the first seven days after a poor night's sleep, which the study authors called the first wave.
The second wave, which occurs 7 to 15 days after a poor night's sleep, occurs when memory and attention problems are more common.
“Every day we wake up as a slightly different person because our mental state is influenced by many external factors,” say the authors of the study, published in the journal Plos Biology.
“Sleep quality, physical activity levels, and the nature of our social interactions influence the health of our brains on different time scales.
“Our findings suggest that behavioral, physiological, and lifestyle factors correlate with brain connectivity on different time scales, both in the short term – less than seven days – and in the longer term, up to two weeks.”
However, it is important to emphasize that this was a single-subject study, and the authors noted that sensitivity to sleep loss varies from person to person and that female hormones during the menstrual cycle may also play a role in these delays, so some people may experience increased effects at various points during the 15-day cycle.
Still, it's disturbing to know that the consequences of lack of sleep don't just affect the next day. It's time to clean up our sleep hygiene.
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Contact MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk by email.
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