By Natasha Turner, ND

The following article is an excerpt from Total Health & Weight Loss, The Truestar Way.

Students, medical residents, executives, workaholics, shift workers, new parents and most of the remaining population create sleep debt when their personal requirements for sleep are not met.

Daytime drowsiness or the desire to sleep later is the body’s natural reaction to a lack of sleep. Keep in mind that many of us are extremely poor judges of our own fatigue levels and most likely require more rest than we may allow ourselves.

Repaying sleep debt requires more sleep than usual. In most cases, though, sleep debt has a natural way of resolving itself because the relationship between wakefulness and sleep discourages us from becoming dangerously sleep-deprived. The natural active process the brain undergoes to ensure sleep helps to maintain natural sleep patterns even when we may overwork.

Health Consequences
Performance
Studies have shown that without enough sleep, a person’s ability to perform even simple tasks declines significantly. The average sleep-deprived individual may experience impaired performance, lack of concentration and daytime drowsiness. They are less alert and attentive and are unable to concentrate effectively.

Emotional Well-Being
Persistent sleep deprivation can cause significant mood swings, irritability, erratic behavior, hallucinations and in extremely rare cases, death. Activity in the parts of the brain that controls emotions, decision-making processes and social interactions is drastically reduced during sleep. This suggests that deep sleep may help people maintain optimal emotional and social functioning while they are awake.

Diabetes and Heart Disease
Lower rates of diabetes and heart disease are associated with adequate rest and recuperation. Studies have found that higher levels of glucose intolerance, a pre-diabetic condition, are associated with sleep deprivation.

Mental Disorders
Sleeping problems occur in almost all people with mental disorders, including those with depression, anxiety, manic depression and schizophrenia. In addition, sleep deprivation may actually cause or contribute to depression or anxiety disorders, making it difficult to determine which came first.

People with depression or anxiety often wake up in the early hours of the morning or soon after going to bed and find themselves unable to get back to sleep. The amount of sleep a person gets also strongly influences the symptoms of mental disorders.

Sleep deprivation can be an effective therapy for people with certain types of depression associated with a tendency to oversleep, while it can actually cause depression in others who have insomnia associated with depression. Extreme sleep deprivation can lead to a seemingly psychotic state of paranoia and hallucination in otherwise healthy people and disrupted sleep can trigger episodes of mania (agitation and hyperactivity) in people with manic depression.

Epilepsy
Sleep affects some kinds of epilepsy in complex ways. REM sleep seems to help prevent seizures that begin in one part of the brain from spreading to other brain regions, while deep sleep may promote the spread of these seizures. Sleep deprivation also triggers seizures in people with some types of epilepsy.

Pain Management
Patients who are experiencing pain and are unable to sleep may notice their pain more and increase their requests for pain medication. The interaction between sleep and pain is important in patients suffering from arthritis, fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions. Not only can pain disturb sleep, but alterations in the deeper sleep stages, induced by pain and inflammation, may also decrease the pain threshold, as well as the ability to heal because growth hormone, important for rebuilding body tissues, is reduced.