We’ve all experienced not getting enough sleep. Those bad nights where it takes hours to drift off because our mind is racing, we wake up super early for no apparent reason, or despite seeming like we’ve had a full night’s sleep, we wake up still feeling completely exhausted.
When we’ve had one of those bad nights, we can spend the next day feeling tired and miserable, constantly reaching for caffeine just to survive the day. We’ve got that constant brain fog and we’re generally just really irritable. I like to refer to it as being “Tangry!” (tired-angry).
One bad night can really set us back, but what happens when poor sleep starts becoming a pattern?
What happens to our brain when we’re not getting enough sleep?
Most adults need somewhere around 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night, and within that we need the different stages of sleep that I talked about in my previous blog, Understanding Sleep: Why Your Brain Needs Sleep.
When we regularly don’t get enough good-quality sleep, our brains simply don’t get all the restoration and processing time they need. This can start to affect things like our reaction times, memory, ability to retain information, concentration, problem-solving and decision-making. And when sleep deprivation continues, these effects can become increasingly noticeable.
Sleep can also affect the systems involved in regulating our appetite. Two hormones you might have heard of are leptin, which is involved in signalling fullness, and ghrelin, which helps signal hunger. Research into exactly how sleep affects these hormones is complex, but sleep restriction has been associated with changes in appetite regulation and an increased desire for higher-calorie foods.
This is also one of the reasons sleep can be an important part of the bigger picture when we’re looking at weight management and our relationship with food.
Then there’s emotional regulation.
Research has found that sleep deprivation can increase the reactivity of the amygdala, the part of the brain heavily involved in detecting emotionally significant or threatening information. At the same time, communication with areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in regulating our responses can be affected.
In everyday terms, that can mean things that usually wouldn’t bother us suddenly feel much harder to deal with.
Think about opening your emails at work and finding a slightly irritating message from someone. After a good night’s sleep, you might read it, roll your eyes, deal with it and move on with your day.
Read that exact same email when you’re exhausted, already struggling to concentrate and feeling irritable, and suddenly it can feel like the final straw. You might find yourself getting far more frustrated by it, struggling to concentrate on anything else or firing off a response that you probably wouldn’t have sent on a better day.
The email hasn’t changed. Your ability to cope with it has.
So when we start to lack sleep and our brain isn’t getting the vital rest and restoration it needs, our ability to think clearly, regulate our emotions and respond rationally to what’s going on around us can suffer.
The relationship between stress and sleep
Stress and sleep have a very close relationship, which is why sleep difficulties are something I often see alongside stress and anxiety.
When we’re stressed, the hypothalamus is involved in activating our stress response, eventually leading to the release of cortisol. The amygdala also plays an important role in detecting potential threats and triggering our fight, flight or freeze response.
When stress becomes prolonged, it can affect areas of the brain involved in memory, learning, decision-making and emotional regulation, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
So, when we’re stressed, the brain is essentially being told, “There’s something I need to deal with.”
That isn’t particularly compatible with switching off and going to sleep.
You know there’s a lot going on and logically the best thing you could probably do is rest, but your brain has other ideas. It’s going over conversations, things you wish you’d said in the moment, jobs you haven’t completed yet, worries about tomorrow or events coming up.
As stress increases, it can heighten our physiological arousal. So although you’re exhausted and desperately want to sleep, your brain and body aren’t necessarily in the best state for it. Not only can this make it harder to fall asleep in the first place, it can also contribute to waking during the night and struggling to fall back asleep again.
Of course, stress isn’t the only reason we can struggle with sleep. Persistent sleep problems can have a range of causes, including medical conditions, medications, pain, hormonal changes and sleep disorders.
If you’re regularly struggling with your sleep, particularly if you’re experiencing symptoms such as loud snoring, pauses in breathing or extreme daytime sleepiness, it’s always worth speaking to your GP to rule out anything that may need medical attention.
Remember the filing system?
In my previous blog, I described the brain as being a little like a giant filing system.
Throughout the day, papers are being thrown onto your desk. Conversations, worries, frustrations, achievements, problems to solve and everything else we experience all create information for the brain to process.
Sleep, including REM sleep, plays an important role in processing memories and emotional experiences.
If you’re highly stressed, imagine there being mountains of paperwork sitting on that desk. Your brain has a lot to process.
If your sleep is then disrupted or insufficient, you may wake the next morning without feeling fully restored, only for a whole new day’s worth of “paperwork” to start arriving.
And round and round the cycle can go.
Why poor sleep can make everything feel harder
After a poor night’s sleep:
- concentration and attention can be worse
- emotional regulation can be harder
- irritability can increase
- decision-making and problem-solving can feel harder
- relatively small problems can feel much bigger
- we can simply feel less resilient when dealing with everything the next day
And this is where the relationship between stress and sleep becomes particularly important.
Stress can make it harder to sleep.
Poor sleep can make us less able to cope with stress.
Feeling less able to cope can create more stress.
And then that increased stress can make it even harder to sleep the following night.
It can become a vicious cycle.
Why improving sleep can improve so much more
This is why sleep, and getting enough good-quality sleep, is so important.
If sleep and stress can negatively reinforce one another, improving sleep can start to work in the other direction too. As our sleep improves, we give our brain and body more opportunity to restore, process and prepare us for the next day.
Going back to that filing cabinet, we’re giving ourselves a better opportunity to deal with the paperwork before another pile lands on the desk tomorrow.
I see clients for a whole range of different issues and, when I delve a little deeper, their sleep habits are rarely ideal. Yet as sessions progress and I ask them what’s been good, one of the things I hear so often is that their sleep has started to improve.
And I love that, because sleep might not even have been the reason they originally came to see me. They may have come for support with anxiety, feeling overwhelmed or wanting to improve their confidence, yet better sleep can be one of the positive changes they begin to notice along the way.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can support people in reducing stress and developing healthier patterns, and sometimes improvements in one area can have positive knock-on effects elsewhere too.
Getting a good night’s sleep can give us a much better foundation for improved mood, resilience, concentration, energy and motivation.
Making sleep a priority, and getting support when stress or a busy mind is getting in the way of it, can help you feel more able to cope with everyday life and, ultimately, more like yourself again.
If poor sleep, insomnia or a busy mind is starting to affect your everyday life, you can find out more about how I support clients on my Sleep Problems & Insomnia Support page.
Related Reading
Understanding Sleep: Why Your Brain Needs Sleep
Ever wondered what your brain is actually doing while you sleep? Learn about deep sleep, REM sleep and why both are so important for our physical and mental wellbeing.