Stylist's Alix Walker goes off to bed to find out how lack of sleep is affecting her life in real terms.
Sleep deprivation: Stylist's Alix Walker decided to keep a sleep diary to monitor how rest deprivation is affecting her health in real terms
But as with most scary statistics, the warnings can soon begin to sound like white noise. So my editor asked me to conduct an experiment to see how much my terrible sleep is impacting my health and my life in real terms. “Melatonin, the hormone that tells us we’re sleepy, is suppressed by the blue light our devices emit,” says Anna Persaud, CEO of This Works, whose best-selling product all over the world is its“Exposure to it impacts both how long we sleep for and also our readiness for sleep.” But it’s also the content of our phones.
“People reach for caffeine because they know it keeps us awake,” says Walker. “Caffeine’s a psychoactive stimulant, the only one we readily give our children, and it’s the second most-traded commodity on the planet, which should tell you all you need to know about sleep deprivation. The danger is that even if drinking caffeine doesn’t stop you going to sleep, when it’s in the brain at night you don’t fall into as deep a sleep, meaning you don’t wake up feeling refreshed.
We’re so used to the rhetoric that successful people wake at 4am to check their emails and do their work that somehow not sleeping has become a badge of honour. “But research shows that lack of sleep makes us less productive,” says Professor Walker. “You are hypermanic,” explains Badre. “When you sleep your cortisol levels decrease; they rise again just before you wake up. If you’re not sleeping enough, your body will accumulate too much cortisol and you become hypermanic. Many people try to burn it off with high levels of activity, but after a certain level you burn out.”“On the advice of the various sleep experts, I’ve taken tests to see the impact of my lack of sleep.
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