Sleep disorder leads to insulin resistance! More than a century of sleep research reveals the undesirable consequences of staying awake for long periods. Disruption of your sleep patterns may not only be a problem that disrupts your daily routines or affects your energy level during the day. Sleep disorders alter chemical interactions in your brain and ultimately disrupt your metabolism.
In 1997, Bob McCarley conducted an experiment at Harvard University School of Medicine. He kept the cats awake by playing constantly, and as a result found that adenosine levels rose in their forebrain. Adenosine levels also slowly returned to normal in cats that were allowed to sleep. McCarley and his team also found that injecting adenosine into the forebrain had a sleep inducing effect.
The caffeine in coffee keeps us awake by blocking adenosine receptors in the brain. However, thanks to the brain’s cleverly designed two-step protection mechanism, when adenosine levels increase, it also increases adenosine receptors, increasing the sleep-inducing effect of adenosine. Thus, it slows down the cognitive functions of the brain. Adenosine may be a cause of poor performance in sleep disorders.
Sleep Disorder Can Cause Structural Damage in the Brain
Studies by Chiara Cirelli and her team from Madison School of Medicine show that the brain develops physical damage due to sleep disturbance. The return of this damage is not clear. Researchers found that mice kept awake for long periods of time developed structural defects in cortical neurons, namely brain cells.
Mitochondria activation was observed in the brains of insomnia mice. This is an expected result as neurons need more energy when awake. But there were unexpected results, such as undigested cellular waste. These are unexpected signs of cellular aging in the brain of young mice. Moreover, these changes occurred with only a short sleep disturbance of 5 days. While these changes were expected to return to normal with 36 hours of sleep, it was observed that the changes remained.
Moreover, in the experiment conducted by Van Cauter et al in 1999, subjects were put to sleep for 8 hours for 3 nights, 4 hours for 3 nights and 12 hours for 3 nights, and glucose tolerance tests were performed. It was observed that blood glucose metabolism displayed a pre-diabetes-like picture during the period of sleep restriction. So insomnia was disrupting your glucose metabolism, but what was surprising was that it was much larger than expected.
Those Who Sleep Less Get an Extra 300 Calories!
Other studies in 2012 also showed that insulin resistance develops in sleep disorder. Impairment of insulin signaling was observed in the fat cells of the subjects. A recent study found that people who sleep less add 300 calories to their daily consumption without realizing it.
Because restricted sleep sends signals to the brain that require it to go into a catabolic and energy-saving phase. These signals trigger a complex chain of molecular events such as the breakdown of the energy molecule ATP and the increase in fatty acid synthesis. The system sends the message that it needs more energy. This may be the underlying mechanism for our late snacks.