You don’t need a reminder about how important sleep is, especially when it comes to your physical health. I’d bet you already know that poor sleep results in decreased work performance, higher risks for mental health conditions, and an increase in mortality rates. If not, I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference in how you feel when you’ve had a good night’s sleep and when you haven’t.
Despite this, Americans live in a sleep-deprived society. More than a third of us sleep less than seven hours per night, and as many as half of us experience chronic insomnia. This results in $411 billion in lost revenue within the US alone.
Sleep impacts all aspects of your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
That includes your metabolic health.
Today, just 7% of Americans are metabolically healthy, lower than the 12% in 2016. And if you’re struggling to get your metabolic health under control, I’m willing to bet your sleep schedule is also out of alignment.
Understanding sleep and metabolism
We know that sleep has a close connection to our physical health.
But we’re not often shown the connection between sleep and our metabolic health.
To understand this, let’s first break down the process of what happens while you sleep:
- Your muscles enter atonia to paralyze the body while dreaming
- Your breathing and heart rate slows during the first half of your sleep cycle
- Your mind consolidates certain information and enhances your cognitive abilities
- Your immune system releases cytokines to repair inflammation, disease, and injury
- Your body produces and regulates certain hormones (HGH, cortisol, leptin and ghrelin)
When your body has proper sleep architecture (i.e., gets enough sleep without interruption), each of these critical functions will take place every night.
However, if even one thing upsets the balance of your sleep schedule, you might miss some or all of these benefits — leaving you tired, irritable, and metabolically unhealthy.
You can probably interpret the rest.
Without enough sleep:
- Hormones may be improperly regulated and released
- Memory and other cognitive functions may be limited
- Stress levels are poorly managed, worsening sleep quality
- The heart and blood vessels remain under continuous stress
- The body may not recover quickly from injury, damage, or disease
Studies have correlated poor metabolic health to poor sleep in other ways.
For example, adults with poor sleep habits are associated with increased hunger resulting from poorly managed leptin and ghrelin. Sleep-deprived people are also more likely to consume processed carbohydrates and sugars, resulting in weight gain, inflammation, and hypertension.
This creates a negative feedback loop that becomes progressively harder to break. Less sleep creates more hunger for sugar, which causes more inflammation in the body, which poor sleep cannot heal. Plus, the more inflammation you have, the harder it will be to fall asleep, and the worse the cycle will get.
But it gets worse. Numerous studies show that adults who sleep less than six hours per night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack. In developed nations like America, poor sleep is also linked to diabetes, obesity, depression, and other life-changing illnesses.
To summarize: the shorter your sleep is, the shorter your lifespan will be.
Simple ways to ensure a good night’s rest
Poor sleep can take a serious toll on your metabolism. The only way to stop the cycle and push towards healing is to get a good night’s rest.
There are a few ways you can approach this:
- Manage your stress. It’s not possible to eliminate all stress from your life, especially in our current cost of living crisis. However, you can still find creative outlets for relaxation and reprieve. Try taking up a new hobby or getting together with friends at least once per week. If your stress is significant, you may want to take a short vacation to reset and reframe.
- Avoid bedtime snacking. Alcohol, caffeine, carbs, and sweets will spike your blood sugar and force your metabolism into an erratic pattern that affects the quality of your sleep. If you do have to eat something before bed, go for small amounts of low-glycemic foods. Blueberries and almonds are excellent options.
- Optimize your sleep environment. Start by making your room as dark as possible, turning on the overhead fan, and keeping technology out of the bedroom. You may want to wear blue light glasses that limit the amount of stimulating light reaching your eyes.
Ultimately, the best way to maximize the quality of your sleep is to establish a repeatable sleep routine. That means building a simple, predictable, and structured pattern that eases you into a good night’s rest.
I cover all these principles and more in my introduction to sleep course, where you can learn all about the sleep stages, principles of sleep hygiene, and tenants of a sleep routine at your own pace.
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