Dear stressed-out life hackers, I’m with you. Have you ever stressed yourself out by trying to incorporate too many stress management tactics? Have you lost sleep trying to fit more into your sleep routine?

Have you spent a meditation practice thinking about what you can do to find more time to meditate? Or, perhaps, you have grown resentful about how hard it is to fit in a gratitude practice? If any of this rings true, take heart. You are not alone.

Like so many in the fitness world, I love personal development and human optimization.

In the aggregate, this passion has been very positive for me. But, on occasion, I stress myself out with all the hobbies, habits, and life hacks that I want to adopt.

I find myself scrambling to fit it all in and, in the process, diminishing the effectiveness of each practice.

Similarly, to squeeze more time out of the day, I’ve found myself sacrificing some less-celebrated yet vital habits, like sharing an evening routine with my wife or being present with my kids when I get home from work.

It’s important to remember that every decision has an opportunity cost.

Habits like family dinners are not traditionally categorized as personal-development practices, but they significantly impact my well-being. Too often, we neglect the benefit of these seemingly mundane habits when we are setting new goals.

But by doing so, you risk eliminating something essential, and you make it far less likely that you’ll stay consistent with any new practice.

The failure to account for opportunity costs may be the most common reason people fail to maintain their personal development goals.

Take Stock of Your Behavior and Goals

These patterns have played out repeatedly in my life over the past few years. But, recently, I did something different. After another round of self-induced overload, I decided to engage in another self-development staple—a personal inventory where I took stock of my behaviors and goals.

Within this process, it occurred to me that I should create a list of everything I would want to do on a daily or near-daily basis if time was infinite.

My list included:

• Exercise
• Mobility
• Meditation
• Wim Hof breathing
• Cold shower
• Sauna
• Write for a few hours each morning
• Naikan gratitude/reflection practice
• Family dinner
• Spend the last hour of each day with my wife and go to bed at the same time
• Sleep eight hours
• Study timeless wisdom
• Read educational non-fiction
• Read fiction or easy non-fiction at night
• Listen to my favorite podcasts
• Call a family member
• Take a 20-minute nap
• Go biking
• Go on a walk or hike
• Spend time in nature (grounding)
• Learn to play the piano or guitar
• Play chess, solve riddles (cognitive development)
• Do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, play tennis, or play some other active game with/against other people

You might assume that seeing everything laid out all at once would create more stress. But, surprisingly, it took off a lot of the pressure. Something about writing everything down gave me a sense of control over it.

The Benefits of Putting It in Writing

1. It helped me notice how many positive habits I accomplish each day, even when I missed more formalized practices. Seeing what I had accomplished took off a lot of the pressure. If you already exercise, eat well, sleep well, and have good relationships, then relax. Sure, you can add more when life allows it, but it will get much better than that. Once you have those essential habits, you might be better off giving yourself a bit more freedom.
2. It helped me to let some things go until a time when they fit better. You can’t do it all right now, but over a few decades, you probably can. Perhaps I’ll take on Brazillian jiu-jitsu and acoustic guitar when my kids are old enough to start with me. Maybe I’ll have more time for a Naikan journal when I’m not writing four hours a day and working a full-time job.
3. It helped me to identify habits that overlapped, thus, offering the best bang for the buck. For example, daily walks get me out in nature, provide mild exercise, and have a similar effect to meditation. Biking to work allows me to exercise while catching up on podcasts and listening to audiobooks. Double-dipping!
4. And, most importantly, it helped me identify what habits are essential and, thus, must be prioritized. I found that four habits—exercise, writing, time in nature, and time with family—offer more benefits than all the others combined.

It’s worth reflecting upon this final point. In the era of biohacking, it is easy to get bogged down by everything you can be doing to optimize your life. But, essential practices have not changed.

In particular, physical exercise, quality nutrition, sleep, and social connection have more benefits than everything else combined. I’ve long evangelized the benefits of meditation, but in a pinch, it isn’t even close to getting an excellent lifting partner or playing racquetball with your best friend.

For anyone who has more goals than time, I highly recommend taking the time to list out everything you want to do.

Get it all down in a journal or on a computer document so that you can add to it when new ideas come to you. This process will give you a sense of perspective when times are overwhelming, and you lack motivation, or when life seems stagnant.

It is an ideal reflection for anyone who wants to live better.

The post A Guide to Optimize Self-Development Habits appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

When you exercise on a regular basis, you know how your workouts suffer on days when you don’t sleep well. It’s also much easier to recover when you do sleep well. As coaches and athletes, we spend a lot of time planning out and performing workouts, but there has been a recent shift to place more and more emphasis on recovery from workouts. After all, a workout is only as good as a workout you can recover from.

Electrical muscular stimulation, compression, soft tissue work, cupping, and ice baths might be pieces of the recovery puzzle, but none can compete with sleep as the most beneficial recovery technique, along with nutrition and hydration. This is where sleep hygiene comes in.

The Role of Sleep Hygiene

Sleep hygiene is the habits and practices that are conducive to sleeping well on a regular basis. In this article, we’re going to discuss the best ways to ensure a great night of sleep so you can recover from your workouts well, increase your productivity throughout the day, and improve your overall health.

We spend one-third of lives sleeping, so we really need to make the most of that time by maximizing the both our sleep quality and sleep quantity. In terms of exercise recovery, when we sleep our bodies repair broken down tissue, normalize stress and growth hormone levels, help us maintain healthy body fat levels, and increase our body’s ability to utilize oxygen and process fuel during exercise.

Honestly, we need to work on improving our sleep the way we work to improve our strength, endurance, or power in the gym. Most of you already know you that you need to get more sleep, but you also need to focus on the quality of your sleep.

You Must Get Enough Sleep

Let’s start with the length of sleep you need to recover and function well throughout the day. This is both the easiest and hardest place to start because time is a fixed asset in all of this.

The amount of sleep someone needs depends on the person, but a decent rule is 7-8 hours. Recent research on athletes shows that 9-10 is optimal, but we have to weigh what is optimal versus what is realistic. Research on athletes has shown that those who get less than 6 hours of sleep per night experience detrimental effects, so let’s stick with the 7-8 hours a night as our goal.

It doesn’t work if you sleep 6 hours a night during the week then 10 on the weekends, but monitoring your sleep debt is a good way to make sure you aren’t falling into a pattern of missing sleep. By keeping track of your sleep, you can compare your sleep numbers to how well you’re doing with your workouts or even with your fat loss or muscle gaining program.

This has been very helpful to me as a new dad this year because I’ve been able to average 7.8 hours over the past 9 months of my son’s life. Yes, there were nights where I didn’t get much sleep, but I tried to nap and sleep a little more when I could to make up for it. In order to get the sleep you need, you must set some rules when it comes to sleep.

Rule 1: Give Yourself a Bedtime

If I slept less one night, I set a hard rule of when I was going to bed the next night. Figure out what time you need to put the kids to bed, stop working, stop watching TV, get off the phone, or whatever else you do before bed and start getting ready to go to sleep.

It’s best to try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day in order to establish a good rhythm for your body.

Rule 2: Sleep In When Possible

If I don’t have to go to work at my normal time, I’ll sleep in an extra 30-45 minutes to make sure I get enough sleep or to get some extra sleep to add to my positive debt. Use a sleep tracking app and it can really help focus hitting those sleep numbers.

We live in a time where working late and getting up early is glorified, but it really isn’t something to be proud of. Sleep deprivation is linked to overtraining, weight gain, depression, even car accidents.

So change what you need to in order to get those 7-8 hours a night. I’m sure if you audited your evening and morning and really looked at what you spend your time on, you’d see that you can work towards getting a little more sleep if you don’t already get it. Like I said, you only have so much time in a day, you need to prioritize your sleep.

Rule 3: Avoid Stimulants Before Bed

You can start improving your sleep quality by avoiding caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and other chemicals that interfere with sleep.

I try not to have any caffeine after 4 pm. I know that seems early if I’m going to heading to bed at 10 pm but caffeine does affect your sleep whether you feel buzzed and energized at 9:30 or not. Caffeine, nicotine, and other stimulants are understood to be bad for sleep, but a lot of people think alcohol is helpful because it can make you sleepy.

While alcohol is a depressant and makes you tired sometimes at first, after a few hours it acts as a stimulant, increasing the number of awakenings and generally decreasing the quality of sleep later in the night. Limit your drinking to one to two drinks in a day and try not to consume them 2-3 hours before bed.

Rule 4: Create a Sleep-Promoting Environment

You need to turn your bedroom into a sleep-promoting environment. Keep it quiet and dark. When people tell me they have a hard time sleeping I always ask if there’s a TV in their bedroom and the answer 9 times out of 10 is yes.

Get the TV out and use nightlights or dimmer lamps when getting ready for bed. My wife and I typically get ready for bed using a small table lamp in our room before bed. Light has a lot to do with our sleep cycle. Before alarm clocks, we went to bed when it was dark and we got up when it was light. Our bodies continue to do well in modern times by increasing the amount of natural light we’re exposed to during the day and decreasing the amount of light we’re exposed to at night.

This is where electronics come in, or should I say, get thrown out. One of the greatest things you can do for your sleep quality is to stop using electronics before bed—at least a half hour if not an hour or more. The more the better, honestly. It’s tough for me running my online personal training company, being a full-time personal trainer, teaching at a college part-time, and producing a podcast so I’ll be honest, I’m not the best at this one but I do stop watching TV and checking my phone about 30 minutes before bed.

Blue light from electronics actually decreases your body’s production of melatonin which is essential to sleep. What does increase melatonin though is natural light like candlelight or very dim light, which makes sense because it mimics the sun setting and our bodies respond to that. Stopping the use of electronics close to bedtime also allows us to reduce the noise before bed. Again, noise is like a stimulant, and that’s not helpful when we’re trying to wind down.

Another thing that helps promote a good sleep environment is keeping your room cool—67-68 degrees is best. Again, think about the sun going down at night. It gets cooler outside and that helps signal our bodies to wind down. Your body temperature actually drops a degree or two during sleep so a colder room helps with this. Some studies say 60-67 degrees is optimal for sleep but I really don’t think my wife will let me turn the thermostat down anymore, so 67 degree works for me.

Rule 5: Develop a Pre-Bed Routine

So we’ve talked about what not to do before bed, let’s get into what you can do to help you sleep better. You need to ease the transition from waking to sleeping gradually, so do things that help you relax like reading or taking a bath or a shower. Do some foam rolling or mobility work, drink some herbal tea, or anything else you find relaxing.

I like to take a prepare my overnight oats for the next morning, make my son’s bottle, brush and floss my teeth, and take a shower every night before bed. This routine relaxes me and the familiarity of it allows me to basically start turning off my brain so when I lay down, I’m out cold immediately.

My son’s routine is diaper, PJs, bottle, snuggles on my shoulder, then down to sleep for the night. This routine helps him sleep through the night most nights and if he gets off this routine, it really screws with his sleep. So we establish patterns to help our kids sleep, we really shouldn’t stop as adults, they just include different things.

Rule 6: Resist the Late Nap

Something else that can set you up for a bad night of sleep is napping, especially too close to bedtime. I know this sounds weird because more sleep is usually better, but napping too late in the day throws off the natural sleep rhythm and gives you kind of a half charge that keeps your body too wound up when you want to turn in for the night. I know some people need to nap because of busy work schedules, but the earlier you can nap, the better.

Rule 7: Eat Smart Before Bed

My last meal is usually a snack around 9 pm and normally is fruit and Greek yogurt with nuts or seeds. It’s not hard to digest and keeps me from waking up hungry in the middle of the night. Plus it helps me hit my daily calories.

Snacks can definitely help you sleep better, but it needs to be the right kind of snack. A pepperoni pizza 20 minutes before bed is not a solid choice. Any foods that cause indigestion or are basically difficult to digest should be avoided—nothing too spicy or sugary, and remember, no caffeine, so avoid chocolate before bed.

Also, try to stay hydrated throughout the day, but taper your water intake off as the evening goes on. You want to be hydrated, but not so much that you have to keep waking up to use the bathroom. If you get thirsty at night, keep water by your bed. When you wake up in the morning, drink a big glass of water and you’ll be off to a good start.

Rule 8: Work Out Regularly

A recent study noted that people with minor sleep disturbances improved after four months of brisk walking just 30 minutes four times a week. I know I keep going back to it, but back when humans got up when it was light out, we worked physical jobs until the sun went down, then we went to bed.

This is how our bodies are designed to work. We are supposed to be active throughout the day in order for our bodies to want to calm down and sleep to repair, regulate, and recharge at night. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, just get some kind of physical activity during the day, even if it’s in short, 10-minute bouts several times a day.

Ideally, you should be doing a solid strength and conditioning program with mobility and prehab work for a host of other reasons, but just walking and moving around more during the day will help you sleep better at night.

Sleep Is Recovery

Keep in mind, sleep is the pinnacle in your post-exercise recovery, so take this just as seriously as your workouts and nutrition.

Beyond helping you recover and get fitter, sleep quality is essential in stress management which is one of the key factors in determining your longevity. The healthiest, longest living adults are the ones who sleep well and manage their stress correctly.

The post Clean Up Your Sleep appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’ve found athletes at every level will go to extremes to improve their game. Powders, pills, lighter equipment, better shoes, expensive coaching programs, and banned substances.

How much would you pay for a performance enhancing drug (PED) that provided reduced body fat resulting in improved lean body mass? Or maybe it gave you faster reflexes, reduced inflammation, and increased your strength? How about something that would improve your skin, balance your hormones, and reduce your cortisol?

I’ve got a really good drug for you then, and it’s free. What is this drug, you ask? It’s sleep.

Skipping Sleep Is Bad for You

There is a negative to ignoring this PED and the consequences are significant. Sleep deprivation in some cases can lead to increased risk of cancer, reduced sex hormones, compromised immunity, and an increase of stress hormones along with insulin resistance. In addition, lack of sleep can cause an immediate risk for you and your loved ones when it comes to daily safety while driving your vehicle with a reduction in reaction time similar to that of drunk driving. When it comes to taking inventory of sleep rituals, most of us, including top level athletes, lack tracking the details of our sleep.

Identify Your Level of Sleep Deprivation

Homosapien is an amazing machine. Normally, we adapt so well to challenges that low levels of stress are tolerated easily. However, when it comes to poor sleep habits, things become more complicated. Some possible signs of sleep issues are:

• Hitting the snooze button—the most insane creation ever developed.
• Excessive tiredness upon rising.
• A powerful desire to nap.
• Experiencing brain fog.
• Microsleeps or dozing off at meetings, while driving (oh, Lord no), during movies, or after meals.
• Heart rate variability decrease. This would need to be examined over weeks or months, but if training load, diet, and lifestyle are consistent then this could be an indication of an issue.
• Snoring or other bumps in the night. Around four million people are walking around with undiagnosed sleep apnea. If you share a bed, your partner might be able to confirm your noises.

There could be other things indirectly related to your overall health like digestive issues, headaches, strong caffeine and/or nicotine dependency, and weakness.

“I’ve always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs.” – Francis Underwood

I’ve worked mostly on a default basis with sleep. If someone experiences ailments yet cannot recite their sleep practice over the last week, I assume their sleep could use some work. The good news is that surprisingly small changes can fix it.

Hacks for the Small Problems

These are my absolutes when it comes to fixing a sleep concern. Try all of these first before you move to more extreme approaches.

Consistent Bedtime and Same Rise n’ Shine

This means keep your bedtime and waking time within 30 minutes of your norm despite the day of the week and your schedule. It can be frustrating and a tad anti-social, but that Monday sleep hangover will be a thing of the past. Also, make certain the room is totally dark.

Cold Bedroom Thermostat (60-65° F)

Naturally our body temperature drops as the day ends. This is part of the biological signalling that we need to sleep. Sometimes our body stays too warm and dropping the temperature in the bedroom can trigger the sleep response. If your room is already too cold, and your roomie is keeping you in the frozen tundra, put on an extra blanket or wear socks to bed.

Final Feeding Three Hours Before Bed

Whenever possible you should stop eating or drinking three hours before bed. If you have the correct caloric intake during the rest of the day you should be fine.

“Two hours of sleep before midnight is worth four hours after.” – Charles Atlas

Cut Your Caffeine

Make it a rule to cut off your caffeine at noon each day. The halflife for coffee is around seven hours. A DNA test can reveal your level of sensitivity but most people consume much more than they need.

Limit Alcohol

While alcohol sounds like a good idea to help you relax in the evening, it will have a rebound effect and you will awake once the alcohol has been metabolized. At minimum, your deep sleep is impeded if you drink alcohol in the evening. Studies on students who drank after studying for exams performed worse than students who studied the same amount but did not drink alcohol. I’m not a choir-boy, but I can confirm all of this from my own personal experience. If you want restorative slumber be sure to minimize your alcohol.

No Screens One Hour Before Bed

If you must work on the computer, watch television, or use your smartphone within one hour before bedtime, consider using blue light spectrum glasses.

Exercise Earlier in the Day

Exercise can stimulate some individuals to the point of insomnia. If you get buzzed up after you workout then you should consider moving your session up to an earlier time of day.

Once you have checked off on all of the above, then log your sleep for 30 days and note how much better your look, feel, and perform.

Hacks for the Bigger Sleep Concerns

If you are still suffering for poor night night routines, you can introduce one of these practices. Only introduce one at a time and test your results.

• Consume some high glycemic carbohydrates with the evening feeding.
• Consume a small amount of casein thirty minutes before bed.
• Eliminate your afternoon nap or make it only a 5-10 minute power-nap.
• Meditate.
• Take a hot bath followed by a cool shower.
• Use a magnesium supplement, which leads me to a final point.

Sleep supplements are a no-no if you think taking them will make up for having a poor sleep routine. They could even be more damaging overall. For instance, melatonin is a hormone that triggers sleep, which does nothing for your insomnia and will inhibit your own melatonin production via the negative feedback loop.

Harness the Power of Sleep

This is probably isn’t the first article you’ve read on sleep and it probably won’t be the last. What I hope is that this article will inspire you to take serious inventory of your sleep habits and, if they are broken, you will commit to improving your sleep practice with a 30-day sleep challenge.

I’m a health and fitness practitioner, not a sleep scientist nor a physician. At the end of the day, if you have concerns or doubts you should consult a physician and discuss the need for a sleep study. Serious sleep issues need to be diagnosed by a sleep professional.

The post One PED You Shouldn’t Resist appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The more we know about how exactly sleep deprivation impacts performance, the better we will be able to adjust and prepare. Even better, if we see the effects of sleep deprivation on the actual sport rather than only lab tests we may get even more of that information that we need. To that end, in a study this month in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, researchers examined sleep deprivation on the performance of judo players, or judoka.

Like many combat sports and martial arts, judo imposes a broad variety of physical demands on a person, including power, flexibility, endurance, and quick reaction times. Because of the breadth of physical needs to perform well in judo, if sleep deprivation impacted any of them, it would show through in the performance.

The researchers used a few tests including hand grip, an isometric curling test, and a cardio test for testing power output. They also checked on perceived exertion, or how hard the athletes felt like they were working. The tests were done before and after a judo match at two different times of day – 9:00 in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon. The researchers did the tests at two different times of day to see if the effect on sleep varied depending on the time of competition.

It wasn’t just the competition time that varied. When the sleep deprivation occurred actually varied as well. The judoka each participated in one of three conditions, one in which they received normal sleep (7.5 hours), one in which they got four hours of sleep at the start of the night, and finally, one where they received four hours of sleep at the end of the night. The only difference between the last two groups was when they slept in the night rather than the amount the slept, which is called “partial sleep deprivation,” when you do get some sleep, but not enough.

The results were fascinating. First, without deprivation, the athletes were stronger and had greater cardio power at 4:00PM than 9:00AM. Second, this difference went out the window with sleep deprivation, just as it did after the judo match. That means sleep deprivation had a similar effect as actually exhausting yourself during a performance. Not only that, but the judoka who slept in the beginning of the night and were awoken very early suffered further, with more weakness at the 4:00PM session. The morning session for both sleep deprived groups was the same.

While sleep deprivation clearly affects performance, it seems to get worse the longer your competition is from what little sleep you received. Combating jet lag and other sleep problems before competition with melatonin or similar supplement, and treating anxiety with sport psychology could both go a long way to helping athletes perform better for competition. After all, that’s the name of the game.

References:

1. N Souissi, et. al., “Effects of Time-of-Day and Partial Sleep Deprivation on Short-Term Maximal Performances of Judo Competitors,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 27(9), 2013.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post How Sleep Deprivation Affects Athletic Performance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

That’s what I used to tell myself, too. In my early and mid-twenties I would wake up extra early to get my workouts in, train a client at the gym at 5:00 or 6:00am, then go to class or work for the rest of the day, catch my second workout in the afternoon, maybe teach a fitness class as well, then go home and stay up until 11:00pm or midnight working on school. It didn’t get any better once I graduated and started working shifts at the hospital. I spent a good decade of my life getting an average of about four to six hours of sleep per night and wondering why I always felt like crap, why I couldn’t lose weight, and why I always felt like on the verge of a nervous breakdown on top of numerous other health problems.

People seem to wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. In our society, overtime and eighty-hour weeks are signs of the motivated, the high achievers, and the people that get ahead. No wonder I never considered my lack of sleep to be a problem. Well, turns out skipping sleep really isn’t getting any of us ahead. It’s making us sick. It’s making us depressed. It’s making us fat and aging us at an accelerated rate.

Sleep Deprivation vs. Your Hormones

Chronic sleep deprivation can cause numerous mechanisms to go wonky inside the body. First, let’s talk about how lack of sleep affects several hormones and metabolic processes in the body. Studies have shown that just a week of sleep deprivation can cause significant alterations in glucose tolerance (i.e. how readily your body’s cells can recognize glucose floating around in your blood and pull it into the cells of the body where it will fuel activity). Impaired glucose tolerance can make you more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In fact, studies have shown that subjects who slept less than five to six hours per night were twice as likely to develop diabetes.

Sleep deprivation can also cause weight gain. Studies have shown the greatest risk for obesity to be when one gets two to fours hours of sleep per night, and the lowest BMI was associated with subjects who got an average of 7.7 hours of sleep per night. Now, before you go lock yourself in your bedroom for a snooze-athon anticipating to wake up ten pounds lighter, let’s talk about why sleep impacts weight this way. Like I mentioned before, impaired glucose tolerance is a side effect of sleep deprivation. When your body doesn’t uptake glucose into the cell efficiently, you feel tired and hungry more often than you should, which makes you reach for more food, resulting in a calorie surplus. And remember, your body is already not using energy, calories, and glucose well. So guess what happens to those excess calories? That’s right. They get stored away, usually right on your butt, thighs, and belly.

Leptin and Ghrelin

But, it’s not just the glucose intolerance working against you. Sleep deprivation has been shown to lower leptin (an appetite-suppressing hormone produced by fat cells, which is normally produced in abundance at night) and increase ghrelin, (a hormone released by the stomach that stimulates hunger, which is also secreted at night but normally in lesser amounts). Research subjects were found to have an increased sense of hunger and tended to reach for carbohydrate-dense, sweet, and salty foods when sleep deprived. So, let’s see – you’re glucose tolerance is impaired, you’re hungier, and you’re reaching for all the wrong things to eat. Fantastic! But wait! We’re not done!

Cortisol

You’ve probably heard of cortisol. It has become a buzzword associated with stress and belly fat. Cortisol has its purpose and place. It helps our bodies respond to stress appropriately so that we don’t become ill. People who do not produce adequate levels of cortisol are diagnosed with Addison’s disease and suffer from numerous problems. So, you need cortisol in the right amounts and at the right times. However, bedtime is not when you want your cortisol to be high as it heightens alertness.

Chronic sleep deprivation seems to mess cortisol secretion up. In studies on individuals who were sleep deprived (four hours of sleep per night), evening cortisol levels were elevated and the levels decreased six times slower when compared to control subjects. These elevations in cortisol further increase the likelihood of developing diabetes and obesity. There’s that dang diabetes and obesity issue again. Seeing a pattern here?

Sleep Deprivation vs. Your Brain

Oh, and let’s not forget how sleep deprivation affects our cognitive skills. Studies have shown that chronic and acute sleep deprivation will negatively impact learning and thinking. Attention, alertness, reaction time, memory, reasoning skills, and creative thinking all suffer when we don’t get enough sleep – both acutely and chronically. See, all that cramming you did for tests back in college? Wasted. You should’ve just stayed out and partied. I kid. I kid. (Sort of.)

Sleep Deprivation vs. Your Immune System

Lastly, when sleep suffers, so does your immune system. There are specific types of immune cells, namely cytotoxic natural killer cells and CTL, floating around in your body that peak in number during the day. They fight off foreign antigens and repair damaged tissue during the day when tissue damage is most likely to occur.

At night, during the early stages of sleep and particularly during slow wave sleep (SWS), different types of immune cells peak in concentration (T helper cells and antigen presenting cells for those nerds in the crowd), prolactin and growth hormone peak, and cortisol and catecholamine productions drops. All of these changes make for an environment that supports inflammation.

Say what? That’s not good, right?

Well, when we get adequate amounts of sleep this inflammatory state supports the immune system by enhancing the body’s ability to form an initial immune response to invading ”bugs.” It also enhances long-term immune function. Basically, the body remembers the invaders over a long period of time. This inflammatory system, when you’re getting enough sleep, is balanced by the anti-inflammatory hormone, cortisol.

Whenever you chronically skimp on sleep, the inflammatory state is unbalanced. Blood levels of C-reactive protein, an inflammatory marker used by medical professionals to predict the risk of heart disease and diagnose general inflammation, go up when sleep is too short for a prolonged period of time. This inflammatory state resulting from a lack of sleep has been shown to do nothing to support the immune system, only to impede it’s function, and put the body at risk for infection, chronic diseases, and cancer.

So, as you can see, if you think you need to get to work early and stay up late to “get ahead” think again. And obviously, in my younger years, I was sadly mistaken when I thought I was burning more calories. If anything I was making it even harder for me to lose weight. Sleep is vital to our health and well-being. And, let’s be honest, we all look a little sexier and perform a lot better when we get enough shut-eye.

So, get to bed people! And if you’re having trouble going or staying asleep stay tuned for some tips on how to make improve your sleep quality.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post How Sleep Deprivation Fries Your Hormones, Your Immune System, and Your Brain appeared first on Breaking Muscle.