How Sleep Can Make or Break Your Day, Your Mental Health, and Your Waistline

I firmly believe, and I am fairly confident that I am backed by a substantial pool of scientific evidence, that too much or too little sleep can play a huge role in both weight gain and depression.

My boyfriend recently started working an 11pm to 7am shift at work. We knew beforehand that the schedule would be inconvenient and unpleasant, but the actual extent of the problem took us by surprise. After working his first overnight shift, I welcomed him home the next morning and rushed him to bed, figuring he would be exhausted. Unfortunately, his schedule was so badly interrupted that he was unable to sleep more than two hours that entire day. That night he had his second overnight shift, which he worked on practically no sleep. The following morning, I was positive that he would be so exhausted he would fall into bed and sleep for hours, but again he was only able to sleep for a little while – about four hours this time.

We decided that, since he wasn’t sleeping anyway, we might as well go out and enjoy the day. His sleep deprivation was getting to the point where I was really starting to get worried about his health. As a natural night owl, I am well acquainted with the effects of some sleep deprivation – what else can you do when you have to lie in bed staring at the ceiling knowing you have to be awake in just three hours? But the extent of his sleep deprivation that day really showed me what can happen when you are running on no sleep.

1. Interruption of normal life
Periodically throughout that day and the following days, he dropped out of conversations and activities to go lie down for a couple of hours. He was still largely unable to sleep, but his body was telling him that he needed rest so badly that he really had no other option but to listen to it.

2. Exhaustion – and probably food to compensate for the lack of energy
I know very well how I react the day after a bad night of sleep – I endlessly munch on things. Usually treats. The act of eating food somewhat wakes you up because the tastes, smells, and actions are keeping you busy. Not only that, but sometimes you can unconsciously reach for the energy from food in replacement of the energy that would have been replenished during sleep.

3. Increased tendency to get sick
After only the first night, what I consider to be a fairly short period of time without sleep, my boyfriend already was plagued with intense headaches and a sore throat. By the end of the second night, it was worse. It’s very probable that his lack of sleep caused him to have a weakened immune system, not to mention that it possibly reduced his pain threshold so his headache and sore throat seemed to get worse.

4. Relationships may suffer
When you lose sleep, you become less attentive, less willing and able to focus energy on another person, and sometimes downright cranky. I know that when I don’t get enough sleep I get irritated over the stupidest things – in fact, someone even telling me that I’m being cranky is more than enough to set me off. During the first few days of my boyfriend’s insomnia, our conversations went back and forth between pointless arguments and him just staring at things while I talked at him until I realized that he had zoned out.

5. Less emotionally equipped to deal with problems
When I am sleep deprived, I cry at the drop of a hat. I get so overwhelmed that I usually just sit in an anxious quivering lump until someone snaps me out of it or I finally get some sleep. I get useless, basically – and very unhappy and stressed out about it. Generally, I turn to food to make me feel better about being so unhappy and stressed out.

6. Less problem solving and mental ability
Trying to take a test at school or perform a demanding task at work while sleep deprived can hugely affect your results. If you don’t believe me, skip sleeping tonight and then at noon tomorrow, do a crossword puzzle or a logic game. It will probably be pretty ugly.

7. Less likely to engage in healthy behaviors such as exercise
What is the last thing you want to do when you are running critically low on energy? Get up and spend more energy, of course. Until you get some sleep, you will probably more closely resemble a rock than a rubber bouncy ball.

8. Hormones
This article explains it better than I probably could.

In the end, what does all this lead to? Depression and weight gain, if you are anything like my boyfriend and me.

I won’t pretend, however, that oversleeping isn’t an equally large problem. While I occasionally struggle on days where I slept badly the night before, I remember huge chunks of my life that were dramatically harmed from my constant oversleeping. I used to, for months at a time, never even see the sunlight – I went to bed at probably seven or eight in the morning most days, and didn’t wake up until the sun had set again. Quite apart from simple oversleeping, my intensely screwed up schedule caused a multitude of problems for me. For this post, however, I will just focus on the oversleeping issues.

1. Neverending grogginess
This is different from the above effect of undersleeping where you are just tired constantly. When I refer to feeling groggy from oversleeping I mean that feeling that your whole brain and body has turned to sludge. Thinking is slow, action is slow, and everything that tries to get you to keep up and move quickly is annoying. This of course, makes you less likely to exercise, and more likely to reach for some food to give you an energy boost.

2. Constant headaches
I was so used to having headaches that it was an oddity I immediately noticed if I woke up without a headache. It got so bad, my mother took me to a neurologist to rule out a tumor or other problem.

3. Feeling of wasting my life
My whole existence was just a few hours during the night for months at a time. I slept about two thirds of the day away, leaving very little time to actually get things done and to enjoy anything. Not having enough time to do things just made me feel overwhelmed at the thought of having to do anything – so I pretty much just didn’t do anything at all (except eat). This was one GARGANTUAN part of why I was so depressed. Sadly, depression just caused me to want to sleep more.

Nowadays I keep a lot tighter of a hold on my sleep schedule. I have plenty of tricks up my sleeve to help keep my sleep regulated. I will actually probably write a post about all of those techniques sometime in the near future.

Please note that while I have provided some links to related articles, I haven’t necessarily cross checked all of the info in them – if you are interested, that would be a good place to start.

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