Growing tired of hearing just how bad a poor night’s sleep can be for us? Well, it may be worse than we thought.
We’ve heard time and time again that a lack of sleep can lead to negative health outcomes, from a weaker immune system, to stress, and anxiety.
The immediate effects of a rubbish night’s sleep are obvious: fatigue, a weird appetite, grumpiness.
On days like this, we resign ourselves to ‘catching up’ on sleep and tend to feel better after a day or two of good rest.
But new research has found that just one night of bad sleep can cause ripple effects for up to 15 days.
The longitudinal study, which lasted 133 days (just over four months) used smartphones and wearables as well as brain scans to track the impact of sleep on one subject’s brain connectivity — this includes things like attention, memory, resting state, and the effects of naturalistic stimuli.
It found that sleep disruptions (even when the total sleep duration remains unchanged) as well as a lack of sleep can have lasting impacts on memory, attention, and focus.
Essentially, there appears to be a lag between the night of bad sleep and its potential impacts, meaning the negative effects can creep up on us.
Namely, focus tends to be impacted in the first seven days following a bad night’s sleep, which the study’s authors named the first wave.
The second wave, which happens seven to 15 days following a bad night’s sleep, is when impaired memory and attention are more likely to occur.
‘Every day, we wake up as a slightly different person, as our mental states are influenced by many external factors,’ the authors of the study, published in the journal Plos Biology, reported.
‘The quality of sleep, the level of physical activity, and the nature of our social interactions all affect the state of our brains at different timescales.
‘Our findings suggest that behavioural, physiological and lifestyle factors correlate with brain connectivity across different timescales, in both the short term – less than seven days – and longer term, up to two weeks.’
It’s important to point out that this was a single-person study though, and the authors noted that sensitivity to sleep loss varies from person to person and that women’s hormones during the menstrual cycle may also play a factor in these lags, so some people might experience heightened effects at different points in the 15-day cycle.
Still, it’s disconcerting to know that the consequences of slacking on our sleep aren’t just for the following day. Time to scrub up on our sleep hygiene.
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