We all know that a lack of sleep prevents your brain from being able to make new memories. With less sleeping hours, the memory inbox of the brain shuts down and you cannot commit new experiences to memory. Thus, new incoming informational emails are just bounced, and you end up feeling as if you are amnesic because you cannot essentially make and create those new memories.

A lack of sleep will also lead to an increased development of a toxic protein in the brain that is called beta amyloid and that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It is during deep sleep at night that a sewage system within the brain kicks into high gear and it starts to wash away the beta amyloid. Therefore, if a person does not get enough sleep every night, more of that Alzheimer’s-related protein will build up inside his or her brain. The more this protein builds up, the greater this person runs the risk of developing dementia in later life.

How the lack of sleep affects our body.

Sleep deprivation affects the reproductive system. Some studies have shown that men who sleep just five to six hours a night have a level of testosterone which is that of someone ten years their senior. Lack of sleep will age you by almost a decade in terms of virility and wellness.

At the same time, not enough sleep impacts human immune system. After just one night of four to five hours of sleep, there is a 70-percent reduction in critical anticancer-fighting immune cells called natural killer cells. For this reason, short sleep duration increases your risk of developing numerous forms of cancer including bowel cancer, prostate cancer, as well as breast cancer. Breast cancer rate is currently rising too much, leading the World Health Organization to classify any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen.

In addition to that, sleep deprivation impacts our cardiovascular system because it is during deep sleep at night that human beings receive the most wonderful form of effectively blood pressure medication. The heart rate drops, the blood pressure goes down. If we are not getting sufficient sleep, we cannot get that reboot of the cardiovascular system, and the blood pressure rises. If we sleep six hours or less every night, we run an increased risk of having a fatal heart attack or stroke in our lifetime.

It may remain questionable what the recycle rate of a human being is and how long we can live without sleep before we start to see declines in our brain function or even impairments within our body.

Here is the answer: Once we get past 16 hours of being awake, that is when we start to see mental deterioration and physiological deterioration in the body. After a person has been awake for 19 or 20 hours, his or her mental capacity gets so impaired that it would seem like that person was drunk behind the wheel of a car! We need about eight hours of sleep to repair the damage of wakefulness.

Sources: University of California Berkley, the book “Why We Sleep” written by Matthew Walker