You think it's normal, but it may actually be 4 signs of severe sleep deprivation

Is this you?

At 10pm, I was still struggling to meet the deadline. I ate supper, milk tea and PPT while working hard. Although I was so sleepy that my eyelids were fighting, and I could clearly feel my brain slowing down and starting to stop working, I still told myself to "hold on a little longer, I must finish it today"...

In the high-intensity work and study and fast-paced modern life, sacrificing sleep time seems to have become commonplace for many people, and being "insensitive" to the body has become a daily routine.

Many people know: "If you don't get enough sleep, you will yawn - yawning means you are sleepy - if you feel sleepy, you need to make up for the sleep."

But you may not know that in addition to yawning, there are many other manifestations of lack of sleep.

According to the data of most people, if you sleep less than 6 hours, you should be careful about whether you are suffering from "sleep deprivation".

The following four possible symptoms seem to have nothing to do with sleep and can easily be regarded as normal: "I'm getting older", "I've been a little irritable lately", "I've become greedy because of the cold weather", and so on.

If it happens only once or twice, don’t worry too much. But if the following obvious abnormalities continue to occur, you should pay attention: This may be an alarm sent by the body, reminding you that you are seriously lacking sleep!

Craving more high-fat, high-sugar junk food

I believe many people are familiar with the experience of binge eating late at night: when staying up late, they always want to eat potato chips, chocolate, fried chicken and other high-oil, high-sugar and high-fat foods - immediately, right away.

Many people would take it lightly and joke about it as "craving for food", but studies have found that lack of sleep can also make people want to eat more junk snacks.

In a survey of more than 3,000 adults at the University of Arizona, 66% of those who lack sleep showed this tendency to be greedy. During the night, the need for food intake is stronger.

Another study from the University of California, Berkeley, also found through brain magnetic resonance imaging that compared with good sleep, lack of sleep can seriously damage the activity of the brain's frontal lobe, making the brain's reward system more reactive to high-calorie, high-fat foods.

This is also related to "getting fat": if you reduce your sleep time by 1 hour a day, you will gain 2 kilograms more, which may not be an exaggeration.

A meta-analysis of adults showed that a one-hour reduction in sleep per day was associated with an increase in BMI of 0.35 kg/㎡, which is approximately equivalent to 2 kilograms of weight for a person 170 cm tall.

This may be because lack of sleep affects the secretion of leptin and ghrelin. The combat effectiveness of leptin, which is responsible for "stopping eating", is greatly reduced, while the attack power of ghrelin, which "urges you to eat crazily", increases suddenly.

This forms a domino effect : the less sleep you get, the more likely your brain is to be hijacked, the stronger your desire to eat junk food, and the easier it is to gain weight .

Difficulty concentrating

I feel my brain is getting stupid

A colleague who has been staying up all night for several days and didn't get a good night's sleep on the weekend, his eyes are empty, he has difficulty concentrating, and his soul seems to be floating above his brain... You have to call his name several times before he responds, and talking to him is like talking to a ghost.

Yes, he/she may not be heartbroken, but he/she has not gotten enough full sleep and his/her brain CPU is almost burned out.

A study published in a Nature journal showed that lack of sleep can significantly lead to slow reaction times and reduce attention, memory and executive function.

This may be due to sleep deprivation, which causes the hippocampus to shrink. The hippocampus is responsible for memory formation and consolidation, and lack of sleep is like a low-battery mobile phone that has not been charged in time, causing the system to become stuck or even crash.

The activity of the prefrontal cortex will also be restricted, just like running at a lower frequency, which will greatly reduce your decision-making ability and concentration.

Restless

Everyone seems to be looking for trouble

Yes, “morning grumpiness” has some scientific basis. I would like to call it “sleepyheadedness”.

Studies have found that when we are sleep deprived, our brains are more likely to interpret other people's expressions negatively.

It is clearly an expressionless "neutral face" without a trace of emotion, but in the eyes of people who haven't gotten enough sleep, it will be interpreted as "threatening."

Two groups of people, one who had not slept the night before and one who had slept for 8 hours, were asked to look at the same set of photos. The results showed that those who had not gotten enough sleep gave much lower scores to the attractiveness and credibility of the people in the photos than those who had gotten enough sleep.

In other words, when you are sleep deprived, you may be more sensitive to the other person's words and actions, less likely to trust the other person, and more hostile towards others.

Image source: References

This may be because severe lack of sleep affects the activity of the brain's amygdala.

Many studies have shown that even a lack of sleep for one night can make the brain's amygdala abnormally active, making it more likely to have intense negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, and anger.

Slow response

Reduced alertness while driving

What is the most intense collision in the world? It is not ice and fire, nor Mars hitting the Earth, but a driver who is not sober enough while driving and a co-pilot who is nervous.

The former complains that the latter is too noisy and keeps worrying about nothing. In the eyes of the driver, he has a clear view of the road conditions and has a premonition and avoidance plan for every possible accident. Even if he almost hits the curb once or twice, he will say, "No, I saw it! It's okay!"

In the latter’s perspective, every time they are on the verge of an accident: driving too close to the car next to them, not checking the rearview mirror while driving, almost running a red light… and the brightest red light might be, “You yawn while driving!”

It may be okay at ordinary times, but please think back: Is the driver not getting enough sleep recently, or has he been driving for too long?

If so, be careful!

No matter how many times people around you remind you to drive without enough sleep, it is not enough. A study published in the Journal of Sleep Research shows that lack of sleep can significantly prolong reaction time and increase the risk of traffic accidents and work accidents.

For people who are severely sleep deprived, driving is almost equivalent to drunk driving. The reaction time of not sleeping for 24 hours is equivalent to the state of blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%.

This is a shocking series of data. Compared with drivers who sleep 7 hours or more, drivers who are sleep deprived have a higher risk of crashes within 24 hours:

5-6 hours of sleep: 1.9 times increased risk of car crash

Sleeping less than 4 hours increases the risk of a car crash by 11.5 times

Don't ever think that willpower alone can overcome your body's reactions. Lack of sleep can seriously reduce your brain's alertness and slow down your information processing speed, especially in scenarios that require quick reactions, such as driving.

Our body is like a carriage, working hard for us 24 hours a day, but do we really understand it?

Is sleep, one of the most important scenarios for repairing and soothing it, being compressed little by little by you?

Being chased by the fast-paced life and living in anxiety about "things that have not happened" in the future is a survival instinct engraved in human DNA.

But if we are in a state of severe sleep deprivation for a long time, it is likely to damage our health, not to mention having a flexible and clear brain.

Shakespeare said that it is better to be a healthy beggar than a sick king.

For the sake of our health, it is time to pay more attention to the signals sent by the body, and let it stop, rest well and get a good sleep when it is exhausted.

References

[1] Theorell-Haglöw J, Lemming EW, Michaëlsson K, Elmståhl S, Lind L, Lindberg E. Sleep duration is associated with healthy diet scores and meal patterns: results from the population-based EpiHealth study. J Clin Sleep Med. 2020 Jan 15;16(1):9-18.

[2] Cappuccio, FP, et al. (2008). Meta-analysis of short sleep duration and obesity in children and adults. Sleep, 31(5), 619-626.

[3] Shan Xinyue, Deng Jiaxing, Zhou Zhiyi, Effects of sleep deprivation on obesity, Clinical Personalized Medicine, 2024.

[4] Krause, A., Simon, E., Mander, B. et al. The sleep-deprived human brain. Nat Rev Neurosci 18, 404–418 (2017).

[5] Ben Simon, E., Vallat, R., Barnes, CM, & Walker, MP (2020). Sleep Loss and the Socio-Emotional Brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[6] Walker, MP, & van der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy. The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 731-748.

[7] Williamson, AM, & Feyer, AM (2000). Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 57(10), 649-655.

Planning and production

Source: DingXiang Doctor (ID: DingXiangYiSheng)

Reviewer: Zhao Wei, Chief Physician, Department of Neurology, Tianjin University TEDA Hospital

Editor: Wang Mengru

Proofread by Xu Lailinlin

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