This is how sleep deprivation affects your heart health!
It is a saying that ‘Consider yourself blessed if you can sleep like a log for 8 hours’ and nothing can be truer than this. Because this single statement implies many things. First is that you have kept your work life balance such that you can have a good night’s sleep, this in turn means you will be less stressed (owing to proper sleep and good work life balance0 and this transforms into the fact that you will not face serious health issues. You might have read or heard that it is during the night or sleep time, our body performs the repair and maintenance functions. So the less time you give your body to carry out these important repair and maintenance functions, the more your body will suffer.

If you are thinking that it is no big deal and dark circles is the only problem, sleepless nights are going to give you, then you need to get your facts straight. The worst side effect of sleeping less than 6 hours is the deterioration in your heart health. According to sleep experts, while you sleep, your blood pressure automatically drops by 10-20%. This is called nocturnal dipping and plays a very important role in your cardiovascular health. When a person is not able to sleep properly, this nocturnal dipping is absent which means a person’s blood pressure doesn’t go down at night. Studies have found that elevated night-time blood pressure is tied to overall hypertension – which is a risk factor for heart diseases.

Experts say that sleep deprivation causes increased sympathetic nervous system activity, vasoconstriction and increased heart rate, all of which are detrimental to the heart health. Dr Gajinder Goyal, Director – department of Cardiology, Marengo QRG Hospital, Faridabad says : “Lack of sleep can affect heart in many ways – it can lead to high blood pressure which itself is a risk factor for heart disease and heart attacks. It leads to more chances of cholesterol deposition in the arteries and also leads to block disruption in the coronary arteries that increases the risk of heart attack and high incidences of heart failure. These patients have an increased chance of heart failure by almost 20-30%. Lack of sleep also leads to obesity and high cholesterol levels which causes heart diseases. During the night-time, the blood pressure is high, and we call it nocturnal hypertension, which leads to very high incidence of heart attacks. Due to lack of sleep, there is a high incidence of stroke, paralysis and diabetes. All these ways the lack of sleep can lead to high incidences of heart disease.

So if you are still hooked to your phone till the wee hours of the morning and you think there is nothing wrong with you, you need to take a reality check because the day your heart stars giving trouble to you, you will be in a lot of trouble.