Is Lack of Sleep Dangerous?

Check out this answer from Consensus:

Lack of sleep is indeed dangerous, with wide-ranging effects on metabolic and cardiovascular health, cognitive function, mental health, and safety. Addressing sleep deficiencies through better sleep hygiene and public health interventions is crucial to mitigate these risks and improve overall health outcomes.

Lack of sleep is a growing concern with significant implications for health and safety. Research has increasingly shown that insufficient sleep can lead to various adverse outcomes, affecting physical health, cognitive function, and overall well-being.

Key Insights

• Metabolic and Cardiovascular Health:
  • Insufficient sleep is linked to increased risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, and metabolic syndrome in both children and adults1 3 8.
  • Chronic sleep deprivation alters cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure and glucose metabolism, increasing the risk of cardiac morbidity3 6.
• Cognitive Impairment and Neurodegenerative Diseases:
  • Lack of sleep is associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. Individuals with sleep problems have significantly higher risks of developing these conditions2 7.
• Mental Health:
  • Poor sleep quality, including sleep distress and insomnia, is strongly related to increased suicide ideation among university students and athletes5.
  • Sleep deprivation affects emotional regulation, leading to increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions7.
• Performance and Safety:
  • Chronic sleep loss leads to significant impairments in cognitive and motor performance, increasing the risk of accidents and injuries, comparable to the effects of alcohol impairment6 9 10.
  • Sleep deprivation results in slower reaction times and degraded performance, particularly during the circadian night, posing safety risks in activities such as driving and operating machinery9 10.
• Adolescent Health and Development:
  • Inadequate sleep in adolescents is linked to negative outcomes in somatic and psychosocial health, school performance, and increased risk-taking behavior4.

Does lack of sleep impact memory?

Itamar Lerner has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of Texas at San Antonio in Neuroscience, Sleep Research

Absolutely. Numerous studies over the last decades have shown that sleep impacts a variety of cognitive functions, including memory, problem solving, motor learning,emotional processing, pattern recognition and even creativity and insight (Rasch and Born, 2013; Lerner and Gluck, 2019). Controlled laboratory experiments show that subjects who are trained on a cognitive task and are then partially or fully sleep deprived the following night, exhibit marked reduction in performance on the same task the following morning compared to subjects who spend the night asleep. Moreover, studies examining subjects sleeping at their natural environment (i.e. their own homes) show that getting too little sleep over long periods of time and across multiple nights causes various impairments in cognitive and emotional processing (Lerner et al, 2019).