How to identify your sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation can affect anyone, from young teenagers to mature adults. It is a situation that should be dealt with as soon as one can, for it can have negative effects on your health – both physical and mental.

On this previous article, we talked about how to improve sleep quality and how adjustable beds can be a way for you to handle sleep deprivation. But to be able to find ways to deal with sleep deprivation, you have to first find out whether you are indeed suffering from it or not. Usually, if you are tired enough and have a comfortable space with the right temperature, you won’t have much difficulty falling asleep. If it’s unbearably hot, you need to use your AC, not just a cooler. If it is not working, get a Jacksonville AC repair service to take a look at it for you. Ensure you are comfortable while sleeping. Never compromise on resting. Now, if you do everything right, and yet you feel exhausted, you might be sleep deprived.
To do so, here are signs that you are in urgent need of sleep.

Major signs of sleep deprivation

You’ve gained weight – You are always hungry

When you don’t get enough sleep, your brain tries to get the energy it needs from food. The less you sleep and the more your body produces the hunger hormone. That is how you end up craving food more than usual, which leads on to you gaining weight. However, not many people would have given this a thought. They might have never considered researching which lifestyle habits can actually cause overweight or obesity besides binge eating. (Only if they had thought about this earlier!)

Truth be told, weight gain can strive to be a severe problem in the absence of exercise like cycling (using an enduro mountain bike) or running a mile every day. It is further accentuated by the consumption of sweets and heavy meals since not only don’t you pay attention to what you eat – that takes way too much energy for someone who hasn’t slept properly – but you also crave that specific kind of food that makes your stomach feel full extremely fast. Furthermore, sleep deprivation can also result in a slower metabolism, hence weight gain.

You have to deal with mood swings

How do you feel after a good night of sleep? Fantastic, right? Well it is the exact opposite of how you feel when you are not getting enough sleep. You tend to be more impulsive, more irritable and more short-tempered. That is quite natural in the way that when running low on sleep, you find it a bit harder to control yourself, and that’s why you find yourself snapping quicker than usual.

The main issue with this is that these mood swings may become more severe and turn into serious disorders. Sleep and mental health are tightly linked, which is why lack of sleep easily impacts one’s mood. It is also why it is so common to have people who suffer from anxiety who also happen to deal with sleep disorders.

Related articles – Best Adjustable Bed For Acid Reflux (Heartburn/GERD)

You find yourself falling asleep when driving

One of the first signs of sleep deprivation is you falling asleep at the wheel without even noticing. When you don’t get enough sleep, your mind doesn’t care whether you are driving or not, when it feels like you are in the right place and the right moment to sleep, it forces you to fall asleep.
In such cases, try to avoid driving, or ask a friend to drive instead.

It is hard for you to concentrate

As indicated before, lack of sleep directly affects your brain’s performances. On top of mood swings, sleep deprivation can also cause a tremendous lack of focus, which results in many other issues such as:

• Memory problems

  Since your concentration drops and you become less attentive to your surroundings, your memory suffers in the sense that you become much more forgetful than usual. Your keys, a phone call, or even worse, an appointment, all those responsibilities get forgotten and add on stress that keeps you up yet again at night. Know that memory problem, which acts as an indicator of sleep deprivation, can also occur as a result of a lack of sleep. Keep in mind that individuals with poor, fragmented sleep often suffer from dementia. Truth be told, dementia could be a troublesome disease, which could disrupt your day-to-day activities. Moreover, dementia is progressive, which means that it may become worse with time. As a result, you might need to opt for the services provided by a memory care facility to carry on with your normal life. So, if you feel you are not getting enough sleep, consult a doctor immediately.

• Making mistakes

  On top of that, you start making unusual mistakes that can even turn into accidents sometimes. Additionally, being sleep deprived is riskier when you have a job as someone like a truck driver. Even if you have everything in order-from health insurance to truck insurance, which you probably chose after finding a trustworthy application or tool to Compare best truck fleet insurance quotes-taking the chance of not getting enough sleep could still result in serious accidents and the loss of your precious life. Since you can get easily distracted in that case and have a hard time focusing on the tasks at hand, you might not be able to pay attention to everything, and thus errors pile up and make you panic, which causes you to make more mistakes and panic even more – and that’s how you find yourself in a vicious circle.

• Tripping

  It sounds ridiculous, but not sleeping enough can cause you to miss one step or two when climbing the stairs, or even trip on your own feet when walking. That is because your brain needs more time than usual to process the information it needs to have you walking in a straight line without falling.

You get sick frequently

There is a reason why your doctor asks you to sleep as much as you can whenever you catch a cold.

Not getting enough sleep may cause your immune system to weaken. That results in you getting sick more often than usual. It is because your body doesn’t have the energy it demands to help your body fight off diseases and infections. Not only that, but when asleep, your body produces proteins called cytokines that help you fight inflammations. Naturally, not sleeping induces a drop in the production of those proteins. That is why you may find yourself frequently getting sick, which indicates a serious condition of sleep deprivation.