Life
Call it a symptom of being a busy woman in the modern era, but the things that suffer when you’re tired can feel like another annoying thing you often have to deal with on top of everything else. But if you’re hitting a wall on a regular basis, you may not be aware of the ways in which lack of sleep affects your health. Even if you feel like you’re handling it just fine, the consequences of exhaustion can impact many aspects of your life in ways you haven't even imagined.
Although simple sleepiness during the day may be one thing, feelings of utter depletion will take you down a whole other, and much scarier, avenue. Exhaustion, when caused by a unique cocktail of stress, overworking, and lack of sleep, has a whole host of negative side effects that can make you look, act, and even feel like an entirely different person. Besides the fact that tiredness can make you look older, lack of sleep combined with a ton of other stressors influence your health and ultimately your whole life. Being conscious of the repercussions that come from exhaustion is an important step toward better overall well being. Here are seven things that are scientifically proven to suffer when you don’t catch enough Zs at night.
1Your Ability To Concentrate
If you’re tired and stressed, Medicine Net noted that you’re going to find it difficult to pay attention and concentrate on daily tasks. (And obviously, you can forget about multitasking.)
2Your Mood
Feeling more punchy lately? According to a sleep journal written by Harvard Medical School, “partial sleep deprivation has a significant effect on mood,” making people feel more stressed, angry and sad than they normally would be.
3Your Digestion
According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, exhaustion can cause inflammation in the body that leads to gastrointestinal issues. Stress, too, causes a surge in adrenaline, which leads to valves in the upper digestive tract staying open. Combined, these lead to acid reflux and chronic heartburn, among other problems.
4Your Choices
According to a 2015 study, a depletion of energy makes it much harder for you to access decision-making skills, which leads you to making worse, less ideal choices on the whole.
5Your Relationships
A study in the Asian Journal of Psycholgoy found that when workers were feeling emotionally exhausted, their home lives and connections with their significant others were negatively impacted as a result.
6 6. Your Ability to Work Out
As Live Science points out, exhaustion causes you to give up sooner at exercise than when you’re at your full capacity. This might seem like a no-brainer, but going without exercise for long periods of time in addition to exhaustion has a negative snowball effect on your overall health.
7Your Immune System
It’s probably no surprise that being on the brink of collapse can weaken your immune system, according to May Clinic. So on top of everything else, when you don’t get the rest you need, you run the risk of getting sick in the meantime.
Images: Timothy Krause/Flickr; Giphy (7)
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