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Losing brain tissue. A small, recent
study of 15 men, published in the
journal SLEEP, found that just
one night of sleep deprivation was
linked with signs of brain tissue
loss, measured by blood levels of
two brain molecules that usually
increase after brain damage.
More likely to get emotional. One
2007 study from researchers
at the University of California,
Berkeley, and Harvard Medical
School used functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging to show
that after sleep deprivation, the
brain’s emotional centers were
more more than 60 percent more
reactive. “It’s almost as though,
without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive
patterns of activity, in that it
was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses,” senior author Matthew
Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s
Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, said in a statement. “Emotionally, you’re not on a level
playing field.”
Less focused and having memory
problems. Being exhausted zaps
your focus, and can render you
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more forgetful (no wonder you
keep misplacing your cell phone
after a bad night between the
sheets). On top of that, sleep is
thought to be involved in the
process of memory consolidation, according to Harvard,
which means shortchanging it
can make it more difficult to
learn and retain new things.
A small study published
last year in the journal SLEEP
found that sleep-deprived
study participants were rated
as less attractive and sadder.”
AFTER A WHILE YOUR...
Stroke risk quadruples. Research presented at the SLEEP 2012 conference suggested that getting fewer
than six hours a night can ratchet
up stroke risk for middle- and
older-aged people. “These people
sleeping less than six hours had a
four times increased risk of experiencing these stroke symptoms
compared to their normal weight
counterparts that were getting
seven to eight hours,” study researcher Megan Ruiter, of the
University of Alabama at Birmingham, told HuffPost.