As doctors warn one in eight of us is sleep-deprived, our reporter conducts an exhausting experiment to show its terrible toll on our health...
Waking nightmare: Those who sleep fewer than five hours each night are three times more likely than normal sleepers to become psychologically distressed, according to an Australian studyHow do you feel this morning? Well-rested? Looking forward to the weekend? Or did you wake, as I did half-way through last week, feeling even more exhausted than when you fell asleep?
The tiredness was just the start of it. I was also achy, cold and bewildered. My skin — normally perfectly healthy — was greasy and gritty. Though I’d had nothing to drink the night before, it felt like I had a thumping hangover.
These things, I half expected. But the mood swings I didn’t see coming. Normally, I am a resolutely chin-up sort of guy. When faced with life’s miseries, I am resilient to the point of shallowness.
Not now. I was suddenly gripped by the fact that my pet cat was at the end of his middle years and one day he wouldn’t be with us at all.
I was overtaken by despair, an intense desolation that quite destabilised my temperament. I felt utterly inconsolable.
It was the first of a series of powerful undertows of depression that swept over me unexpectedly in the days that followed. Everyday upsets could send my morale plummeting: the story of a vandalised bus shelter in my local paper or finding that all the pens on my desk had dried up.
Sometimes it took nothing at all to set me off, just the sudden sense that a yawning dark chasm had opened beneath me, echoing with the question: ‘What’s the point of anything?’
And the worst part of it was, I had actually volunteered for all this. As an experiment, I had agreed to reduce my normal sleeping routine from my regular eight hours per night to five hours.
With the support of close physical monitoring by health experts, I’d see what effects a week’s sudden lack of slumber can have on body and mind. In so doing, I’d join, temporarily, the rapidly growing ranks of sleepless Britain.
Good health — including mental wellbeing — is a fragile, precious gift and last week I discovered how rapidly and profoundly you can upset it. Within just seven days, I began to develop physical and psychological symptoms, including raised stress hormones and even gout.
Furthermore, changes in my body meant I was on the road to heart disease and diabetes.
I’d been turned into a psychological jelly. Oh, and I’d also started eating spoonfuls of jam and peanut butter straight from the jar.
For many thousands of Britons, such sleeplessness is not merely a journalistic test but a grinding fact of life. Our rushed, stressed, work-ridden lifestyles mean that one in eight of us now sleeps for less than six hours a night, according to figures released this month by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
More than a third of us suffer insomnia while another quarter have some other form of sleep problem. The nation’s problem is so bad that the Mental Health Foundation has launched a campaign to raise awareness of insomnia and how it can be prevented or tackled. In Scotland this week, plans were launched to teach teenagers the importance of getting sufficient rest, as part of their school curriculum.
For some people, most famously Lady Thatcher, such sleeplessness is not a problem. A few hours each night is all they need.
While I knew I wasn’t a Lady T, I could never possibly have imagined that just a few days’ deprivation would leave me so unwell.
The problem is that chronic sleeplessness often creeps steadily into people’s lives — its mounting mental and physical toll accrues by stealth.
Before embarking on the experiment, I underwent a complete physical check-up at a Bupa screening clinic. This included a battery of blood tests to monitor, among other things, my heart rate, blood pressure, hormone levels, kidney and liver function and cholesterol levels. I was given a clean bill of health — there were no signs of any abnormality.
It was time to embark on Operation Wakefulness — leaving it three hours later to go to bed each night than my normal 11pm.
As someone who finds it easy to nod off, I knew that in order to stay up to 2am I’d need help — so I recruited a gang of hard-drinking, hard-swearing Seventies cops, in the shape of a DVD box set of all four series of The Sweeney. It wasn’t only the car chases and rough justice that helped to keep me awake, though.
By watching the films quietly on my laptop (so as not to disturb anyone), I had unwittingly enlisted one of the most powerful modern causes of sleeplessness — the electronic screen.
Typical sleep-wreckers include stress, anxiety, depression, ill health, hormone problems and drug or alcohol abuse, but to that list we must now add hi-tech gadgets. Indeed, in the same week as my experiment, an American study revealed that exposure to artificial light in the form of computer screens before going to bed suppresses the release of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, so increasing alertness.
(Computer screens are often worse than TV because you sit so close to them.)
It didn’t take long to feel the effects. By the second day of my experiment, my long hours of wakefulness were starting to become more deranged and dreamlike.
Extreme tiredness would come and go in cycles through the day. For an hour or so, I would feel like I was somewhere near normal (or at least, what I figured to be normal), then suddenly I would get completely sledgehammered by exhaustion.
For minutes, I would be dreaming with my eyes open, then my head would nod heavily, jerking me back into a wakeful state.
I did manage to work a little, but much of it was on autopilot. Bizarrely, my reaction times improved; so did my guitar playing — my conscious brain was switching off and my instinctive brain was kicking in.
But anything that required close, sustained concentration was impossible. I decided not to drive.
Caffeine hit: Countless refills of coffee to counteract the feeling of sleep may not be the healthiest way forwardThen, bizarrely, on day four of my experiment, the little toe on my right foot began inexplicably to swell. And it kept on swelling, doubling its size, until it was the size of a Brazil nut.
In my emotionally charged state, I became rather obsessed with its growth, constantly comparing the engorged digit with my normal toe on the other foot.
Was I hallucinating this problem? Surely toes didn’t grow suddenly that way. That night I did not even get my planned five hours’ sleep — the mere weight of the bedclothes on my toe made it throb so badly that I kept waking. The next day, I could barely wear loose socks, let alone outdoor shoes. I had to slather the toe — now purple — in anti-inflammatory pain-killing gel.
It was as if my foot was acting like an angry downstairs neighbour, furiously banging on the ceiling with a broom demanding to know what the hell was going on. I could not be sure what the problem was — the toe didn’t seem infected.
So it was back to the doctor to see what was wrong. The results were unmistakable: my levels of uric acid, a waste product in the blood that results from the body breaking down foods, had gone up — from 409 µmol/l (micromoles per litre) to 417 µmol/l and rising.
Uric acid is associated with diabetes — and gout. For the first time in my life, it seems I had gout in my little toe, according to the doctor.
But there was a longer term worry. Gout is a common form of inflammation.
Inflammation is linked to sleeplessness — scientists at the American Heart Association have found that when we sleep fewer than six hours a night, the levels of inflammatory substances in our blood can jump by a quarter.
The problem is, inflammation can be lethal. Chronically high levels harden our arteries and damage our hearts, as well as our immune systems.
So not only did I seem to have gout but, if I kept this up, I was at much greater risk of dying young.
And if the inflammation didn’t kill me, obesity would. I have been a muesli-munching vegetarian for three decades, which has helped to keep me on the dietary straight and narrow. But within just a few days of sleeplessness I was overwhelmed by strange, powerful cravings and I found myself urgently spooning peanut butter and jam straight from the jars and into my mouth.
What was going on?
In fact, it’s well known that your appetite hormones get knocked out of kilter by tiredness, wakeful nights and poor-quality sleep.
One study found that cutting sleep down to just four hours increased people’s levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases appetite, by 28 per cent after only two days.
At the same time, their levels of leptin, a hormone which tells the brain that the belly is full, dropped by 18 per cent.
Any more of this sleeplessness and I could see myself rapidly becoming a middle-aged Billy Bunter.
And then there was the coffee. Normally, I drink only one cup a day. Any more and I get jittery. In my sleepless week, the percolator hardly got time to cool down between refills — six, eight, nine, ten, the number of cups a day increased with the experiment. I needed all the help I could get to counteract the tiredness — and damn the jitters.
But it was the effect on my mental wellbeing that was the most alarming. In fact, such depressiveness is apparently a common experience; an Australian study that followed 20,000 people for a year found those who sleep fewer than five hours each night are three times more likely than normal sleepers to become psychologically distressed.
They are more at risk of bipolar disorder, anxiety and panic disorder.
Even a single night without sleep can deeply affect our functioning. Brain scans have shown that after a sleepless night, the centre of emotion in the brain — the amygdala — over-reacts when people are shown disturbing news pictures.
We really do get tired and emotional, it seems.
My wife reports that, to her surprise, I was uncharacteristically cooperative during the insomniac week — but I blame that on being too dog-tired to argue with her.
At the end of the seven days, I went back to Bupa to check whether there were any other measurable differences. The good news was that there was not a marked difference in my heart rate or blood pressure. My body fat levels, cholesterol readings, lung function and kidney and liver results showed no change, either.
But as well as the gout, there was further evidence of the strain my body had taken in my levels of the stress hormone, cortisol — which had risen from 251 nmol/l (nanomoles per litre) to 304 nmol/l.
The increases were not great — certainly not life-threatening. But they were indicative of what would likely happen had I carried on my sleepless lifestyle.
My Bupa doctor explained that it would take several months for other physiological readings to register, but he was in no doubt as to the long-term risks that sleeping five hours a night would have on me in the longer term, putting me at greater risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, in particular.
He had made a special study of such problems at medical school.
Just to cheer me up, he pointed out a study newly reported in the British Medical Journal which even suggests that lack of sleep is a risk factor for colorectal cancer.
To say that I was glad to end the test would be an understatement.
The first night after my experiment, I was careful to return to normal life as briskly as possible — bed at 11pm, up at 7am.
Amazingly, after two nights of sleep normality, my little toe promptly shrank back to a normal size, with nearly all the redness and pain gone.
And I am happy to report that my emotions had returned safely to planet sanity. No more raging mood slumps, food cravings or any other insomniac craziness. My wife reports that I have also returned to my usual argumentative self. At least it shows I am paying her attention again.
I’d probably need to repeat the insomnia test a few times in order to see if this was just coincidence.
But do you know what? For the sake of my sanity, health — and my beloved slumber — I won’t be repeating the experiment any day (or night) soon.
Source:dailymail
