Guest Author - Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen

If you're not getting enough sleep, you're setting yourself up for weight gain, memory loss, and cognitive impairment. Lack of sleep is associated with serious health problems such as obesity, depression, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Your emotional well-being, performance, productivity, and mental abilities are all linked with the amount of rest you get every night. To be your best self, you need adequate rest every night.

The negative effects of sleep deprivation could arise from disrupted sleep, inability to fall asleep, snoring (yours or others), or waking up early. If you have children, you know firsthand how hard it can be to get a good night's sleep – and what the consequences are.

Doubled risk of obesity
If you're losing sleep your body mass index (BMI) is likely to increase, as is your waist circumference. Your risk of becoming obese is almost doubled, according to Professor Francesco Cappuccio of Warwick Medical School. He detected this trend in adults and kids as young as five years old.

Sleep deprivation increases appetite through hormonal changes. Specifically, more of the appetite-increasing ghrelin is produced when you're not getting enough sleep; less of the appetite-suppressing leptin is produced – this naturally causes you to eat more.

Memory loss
Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen of the Harvard Medical School found that "sleep protects memories from interference." The more quickly you fall asleep after studying for a test or learning a new skill, the more likely you'll remember it later. If you learn new information and then go about your daily business, you'll have about a 44% lower chance of retaining what you've learned. This bit of research could be particularly helpful when you're learning a new job; perhaps your boss will give you naptimes throughout the day!

Depression & self-esteem
Sleep-deprived children have longer illnesses, more severe depression, and fatigue than those who aren't sleep deprived. Other studies link sleep problems with self-esteem problems as well.

Intellectual impairment
Researchers at the University of Virginia have found that disrupted or lack of sleep can impair IQ and cognitive development in children. Lower grades and poor peer relations could also result from sleep deprivation.

Body image
I couldn't find research results regarding sleep deprivation and body image. Since sleep is crucial to your emotional and physical well-being, I think it's reasonable to assume that not getting enough sleep negatively affects your body image – especially since we know that sleep deprivation does lower self-esteem.

So, make sure you're getting your five or eight hours – whatever you need – every night! Not only will it increase your feelings of well-being, it could even help you lose weight.