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THE THIRD METRIC
HUFFINGTON
02.09.14
of shut-eye a night, according to
a recent survey. Read on for the
nightmare-inducing truth about
what could be happening to your
body when you don’t get enough
sleep, starting the very first night.
MICHAEL KRINKE/GETTY IMAGES
AFTER ONE NIGHT YOU’RE...
Hungrier and apt to eat more. Studies have linked short-term sleep
deprivation with a propensity to
load up on bigger portions, a preference for high-calorie, high-carb
foods and a greater likelihood of
choosing unhealthy foods while
grocery shopping.
More likely to have an accident. Getting six or fewer hours of shut-eye
a night triples your risk of drowsy
driving-related accidents, according to the National Sleep Foundation’s Drowsydriving.org. Plus,
just one bad night’s sleep can affect a driver’s eye-steering coordination, according to research
from Manchester Metropolitan
University. And sleep deprivation
can just make you generally more
clumsy, whether you’re behind the
wheel or not, reports Prevention.
Not looking your best — or your most
approachable. Beauty sleep is legit.
A small study published last year
in the journal SLEEP found that
sleep-deprived study participants
were rated as less attractive and
sadder, HuffPost reported at the
time. A different study from the
Medical Institutet Karolinska in
Stockholm, Sweden, found that
exhausted people are also judged
to be less approachable. And the
problem only gets worse over time:
Researchers have linked chronic
sleep deprivation with skin aging.
More likely to catch a cold. Proper rest
is one of the building blocks of a
healthy immune system. In fact,
one Carnegie Mellon University
study found that sleeping fewer
than seven hours a night