4 Ways Your Lack of SLEEP is Affecting Your HEALTH

In this podcast, Dr. Dee emphasizes the importance of getting adequate sleep. 

So many times sleep gets relegated to an afterthought; it can easily have the least priority to us, but that can have significant health consequences.

Four ways in which lack of sleep is impacting your health:

1. Sleep is important for the brain to detoxify from it's own waste products that are naturally produced. This is when the glial cells get rid of these byproducts. 

2. Lack of sleep can lead to fatigue and dependence on energy drinks just to get through the day. This creates an endless cycle. The energy drinks negatively impact our sleep quality, further depleted our energy levels. 

3. Inadequate sleep can also wreck our hormones. Inadequate rest leads to higher cortisol levels. This then impacts how our thyroid and sex hormones work. Now we are suffering with lower metabolism as well as loss of libido and weight gain.

4. Poor sleep strains relationships. General Patton said, "Fatigue makes cowards of all men." When I'm always tired and worn out I am not the best version of myself to my family. 

Prioritize sleep. Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep at night. Make sure you go to bed early enough and utliize good sleep hygiene practices to get good quality sleep. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

<silence> Right now you're paying a huge price for your lack of sleep, and you don't even realize it. In this video, I'm gonna discuss four ways in which lack of adequate sleep is deteriorating your health today. Hey guys, I'm Dr . Dee with alpha omega wellness.com, and I'm excited to chat with you today about sleep. So I did another video that goes over four ways in which you can get better sleep starting today, and you can get to that video by clicking right here. I've shared with you before about my sleep woes and my struggles with sleep through residency. Even after residency, I still struggled for a long time to get quality sleep. One of the reasons is because I didn't prioritize it. You know, I really thought that sleep could just be this afterthought. I prided myself on being able to get by on just four or five hours of sleep most nights, and that didn't bless me. Now, with what I know, I realize looking back how much that actually deteriorated my health. And if you're not paying attention to your sleep, let me just explain to you, you're gonna pay a huge price for that. Maybe not today or next month, but over the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, it will absolutely catch up with you because the body keeps score. So we're all on a trajectory of health and wellness. That trajectory is either ascending or descending. And if your sleep is not good, either the slope of how much your health and wellness is improving is not as steep as what it could be, or more likely you're on the decline and you may not even realize it. So here are four ways in which your lack of sleep is deteriorating your health and wellness. The first way is that your brain is not adequately detoxifying at night. You see, sleep is crucial to our brain's ability to remove toxins, to remove byproducts of metabolism, which basically means the brain's function, right? So we're always thinking and doing, and the brain is evolving in these different processes. Well, that creates these toxic byproducts. And so the brain and God's infinite wisdom clears those out. But it mostly happens at night during our deep sleep. And so if you're not getting adequate deep sleep, your brain is not detoxifying, and that is a huge contributor to dementia. When you're older, you probably didn't even realize that, right? So the second way in which lack of sleep is deteriorating, your health is just through fatigue. You see, you've gotten to the point perhaps that you think that your sleep is okay and you just need energy drinks to get by because that's how you are. You just need that fourth and fifth cup of coffee in the morning to get going, and it doesn't have to be that way. You see, if you get all of these lifestyle factors dialed in for yourself, including maybe most importantly, your sleep, your energy level will improve. You see, the body can't make adequate amounts of a TP , the energy molecules. If we don't have enough, if we don't have enough sleep in our lives, if we don't have enough nutrition coming in, the body's gonna experience fatigue. Sleep is integral to our energy level. So the third way that perhaps you don't realize that lack of sleep, lack of quality sleep is negatively impacting your life is through hormone dysfunction. You see our hormones, our entire bodies work as a symphony, right? Everything has to work together. The timing can't be off. Can you imagine going to a symphony in which the brass section, the timing was off from the rest of the orchestra, right? That's not gonna work. And so if you have everything else dialed in, but sleep is just kind of just unimportant to you, everything is gonna be off. The music is going to sound horrible. You see, when we're not getting adequate amounts of sleep, our cortisol, our stress hormone rises, that makes our thyroid not function very well. So that dictates our metabolism. Our sex hormones are off. Everything is a mess when our sleep is inadequate. So the fourth way in which I want to explain to you how lack of sleep is negatively impacting your health is through strained relationships, general patents. That fatigue makes cowards of all men. And having been in that place before where I was physically fatigued from lack of sleep or whatever else was going on in my life, I can tell you that led to emotional fatigue, which meant that I wasn't showing up with the best version of me to my family and friends. And so if you think that those strained relationships will not actually deteriorate your health, you're just wrong because those strain relationships cause us to have more cortisol in our body, the stress hormone, and that excess cortisol causes weight gain, insulin resistance, it causes our thyroid to not work well. It causes all of these other symptoms to develop the root cause being the strain relationship, and the root cause of that being sometimes just fatigue. So lemme encourage you to go back and check that other video out where I actually explained four ways in which you can improve your sleep starting today. But then also think about these issues that I presented today for your reason why, right? We need to have a reason why we actually wanna make lifestyle changes. And so to me, I think the benefits of sleep and the detrimental effects of lack of sleep, that's a huge why for me. So I prioritize my sleep. Now, hey, if this video has been helpful for you, let me just ask you to like and subscribe, share it with your friends, because I believe that people around us, they need this information. Everyone wants to be healthy, right? Everyone wants to thrive and flourish, but a lot of times we just don't know how. And at Alpha Omega Wellness, we are here to just walk that out with you. Ultimately, I want to remind you though, that I think there's only one true healer in the world. And it's not me, it's Jesus. And so if you don't have a relationship with him, let me encourage you to do that. You know, Jesus' brother said in James one 17, every good and perfect gift comes from above. And I believe that that's health and wellness and vitality and abundance and peace and love. I think that all comes from him. And so if you've not yet found that relationship, let me just encourage you to explore that we actually have people on staff at our office that can even help walk that up with you. So until next time, God bless you and I'll talk to you soon. Bye .