6 Things Your Sleep Patterns Can Tell You About Your Health

Your body—and especially your brain—need sleep. While you sleep, your stress system is turned down, your cortisol levels drop, your immune system gets stronger, your brain gets smarter and cleaner, and your body releases hormones like growth hormone and testosterone. Growth hormone is a protein hormone that has a major role in growth and in protein, fat and carbohydrate metabolism.

Have you ever met someone who thinks he or she functions just fine after 4 to 6 hours of shut-eye?

What you do not realize is that the recommended amount of sleep that is best for you and your brain is a minimum of 8 hours and if you are not getting this much sleep, you are likely being kept alert and aroused by adrenalin, one of your stress hormones, rather than being awake because you are truly rested and energized.

These stress hormones alone can wreak havoc on your body (including your skin which ages faster), but even more so, the lack of sleep negatively affects your brain, which needs the fuel and extra time to be asleep for the cells, called neurons and glia, to fully regenerate, clean up house, and thrive.

During sleep your brain is processing complex information, creating and consolidating your memories, learning and remembering how to accomplish tasks, and perhaps more importantly, it is clearing out toxins, the very same toxins that are being shown to be implicated in such neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease1.

According to the 2013 International Bedroom Poll, half the population in the United States sleeps less than seven hours a night during the week, so chances are, you fall into the category of sleep deprivation, putting yourself at risk for health problems.

If it takes you less than five to fall asleep—your body is trying to tell you that you’re extremely sleep-deprived. If you fall asleep within 5-10 minutes, you’re body is telling you that you are experiencing moderate sleep deprivation, as it should take you between 10-20 minutes to drift off into your first stage of sleep.

This is literally a “no-brainer”: If you are tired during the day, so much so that you start nodding off, you are sleep deprived, and your brain is telling you it simply can’t function without more sleep. Though napping is a cultural norm in many countries, in areas of the world where this is not a norm, finding yourself falling asleep at the wheel, at work or any where else other than your bed is a sign of sleep deprivation that could be negatively affecting your health.

You may not know this, but your partner or roommate might tell you that you snore very loudly or that you occasionally stop breathing. This is often an indication of sleep apnea, a condition of interrupted breathing during sleep, often (but not always) associated with a collapse of the windpipe when the muscles relax during sleep or as a result of malfunction of the neurons (brain cells) that control breathing during sleep.

As I mentioned, it is during sleep, especially deep sleep, that your brain consolidates memory via sharp wave ripples, which also transfer any learned information from the hippocampus in your brain, which is responsible for your visual-contextual and spatial memory, to the neocortex, where your long term memories are stored.

According to a 2004 study, people who sleep less than six hours a day were almost 30 percent more likely to become obese than those who slept seven to nine hours.

A study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found that close to 50 percent of men with sleep apnea also had low testosterone levels4.