Sleep and your health
As mentioned, lack of sleep can contribute towards many health problems,
and this has been shown in studies involving night-shift workers. In the
Harvard Medical School Nurses Study, which involved 78,000 nurses,
it was found that those nurses who worked the night-shift for thirty years
or more had a 36% increased risk of breast cancer than their dayshift
colleagues. And in 2009 the Danish government began paying
compensation to women who developed breast cancer after working
night-shifts.
The risks for heart disease and type 2 diabetes are also high, and there’s
a growing body of evidence showing that poor sleep patterns are directly
linked to overweight and obesity. There are a number of reasons for this,
including low serotonin and consequently melatonin levels (more about
these chemicals in step 4), which make you more likely to eat more sugary
foods and refined carbohydrates because these foods increase levels of
serotonin. Lack of sleep has also been shown to increase levels of the
hunger hormone ghrelin, that stimulates appetite and makes us feel hungry,
and it decreases levels of the satiety hormone leptin, which gives us that
satisfied feeling after eating that prompts us to stop eating. Furthermore
being tired in itself can also lead to overeating because sometimes we eat
in the belief that we need food to supply the energy we lack.