hi guys! i see so many of you basically ruining your sleep schedules and so i’m just going to drop this thread on why you should ABSOLUTELY get some sleep

- consistently sleeping less than 6-7 hrs wrecks your immune system + doubles your risk of cancer
- sleep is a key factor in determining if you will develop Alzheimer’s
- improper sleep for even a week will disrupt your sleep enough that you could be classified as pre-diabetic

- short sleep brittles your arteries (leads to many cardiovascular diseases and problems)
- causes you to eat more as sleep deprivation causes a spike in the hormone that tells you you’re hungry and a decease in the one that tells you you’re satisfied

- if you’re trying to diet, your weight loss won’t come from your fat, it’ll come from lean body mass (so its pointless)
- countries whose citizens get the least sleep also have the highest rates of physical diseases/mental disorders

- a study showed a 60% amplification in emotional reactivity to negative stimuli in sleep deprived individuals
- poor sleep worsens the symptoms of various mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, suicidality

- mri scans show decreased ability for the pre-frontal cortex (the brain region that regulates our emotions, is responsible for rational thought) to control the amygdala (associated with aggressive emotional response), making it difficult for people to control negative emotions

- not only are you more cranky, but the reward and impulsivity center of the brain also becomes hyperactive on low sleep, so you’ll experience extreme mood swings of positive and negative

*correction on the first tweet: disrupt your BLOOD SUGAR LEVELS enough that you could be classified as pre-diabetic sorry bahahaha wtf

tw for the tweets ahead so i don’t forget! mental health, s**c*de, health anxiety, etc

- poor sleep can be connected to aggression and hence bullying/violence
- there is a link found in adolescents between poor sleep and s**cd*l thoughts, attempts, and contemplation

- because sleep loss also increases activity in the reward center of the brain, we are more susceptible to addiction
- sleep loss has been shown to be a reliable determining factor in the possibility that a child will develop an addiction in adolescence, adulthood

- otherwise healthy individuals have been shown to exhibit brain activity characteristic of mental disorders from a sheer lack of sleep

there are obviously so many more, these are just a few that stuck with me as i read through some books. take care of yourselves guys! so many of you on anitwt are still so young, and it’s so weird that we have this culture of “omg haha i got no sleep” or even “i bet i had less+

sleep than you” it’s not great to normalize behaviors that are obviously bad for you and i find it really weird that we do? but tl;dr sleep! you need it!

source if you want it: “why we sleep” by matthew walker

a brief summary:

uh wow this blew up uhh okay so it’s morning for me now and i’m just gonna leavr a few things here
1) oh my god i am *absolutely* no expert i just decided to read a bit and i thought sleep is something so many take for granted and it’d br valuable to share its importance +

with you guys.
2) that being said i should’ve been more responsible as to adding tws etc. this was honestly just for informative purposes because *sleep is good* but i also don’t want us to ring the doomsday bell. many of us are still so young and can change our habits +

and i hope that at the very least this will be a signal to change our habits - we can’t blame ourselves for our ignorance in retrospect because no amount of regret or “oh god”s will do anything about changing how much we slept before this thread. i can only hope that this+

will prove informative to you.
3) that being said, if this has caused you any anxiety, again, i’m truly sorry for not putting a proper tw earlier in the thread and if i could edit it i most certainly would. if you are experiencing any anxiety before bed, all i can +

realistically tell you without having a conversation with you one on one is to look into techniques to calm your anxiety online - there are many and not one will work for everybody. if you struggle with anxiety on a daily basis i urge you to reach out to a professional+

whether that be a therapist or even a school counselor - most school counselors should have backgrounds in psychology.
4) know that you aren’t alone in poor sleep - about two thirds of adults in developed countries also sleep less than recommended, but also +

we don’t see people just dropping dead because they aren’t sleeping. you dictate your lifestyle, and, again, most of us here (it seems this has spread from anitwt to stantwt) are also young. we have a lot of time to fix our habits, nobody is a lost cause.
5) i also now see that+

i could have been more precise in my language. while this is a thread about sleeping, it’s more about sleep deprivation and less about sleep schedules. if you would like to know more about sleeping schedules in particular, by all means, i encourage you to inform yourself+

with reliable sources.
again, i apologize if this came off as me scaring you into going to bed. i, too, suffer from insomnia and read this book after an entire month of 30 mins-1 hour of sleep at best. i’d dread the evenings because i knew sleep would never come. it scared me+

as well, but at that point i was just about ready to give up and accept that i won’t sleep, and after reading decided that something must be done. but, it was wrong of me to make the assumption that everyone who sees this will react in the same way. to anyone who has experienced+

additional anxiety because of this thread or has been triggered by this thread, i am deeply sorry. i’m new to twitter so i wasn’t aware of the mute/censor function, so i also wasn’t aware that my censoring wouldn’t come across. thank you to those who have told me and i will be+

more responsible. please stay informed and stay healthy