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You may think that you are getting more done and leading a more productive life by shaving hours of sleep off of your day each night, but there are problems with this that may end up biting you later on down the road. A lack of sleep can do more damage than you think. You may feel tired and sluggish a bit, but that is not all that is going on when you are not sleeping enough each night. Eight hours is great, though some need more and some need less, but you do have to make sure you get what your body requires or things could get ugly.

One thing that can happen with a lack of sleep is that you are going to have trouble concentrating and remembering. You may think that when you read something and memorize it, you are then going to remember it, but that is not true. You are putting it in your short term memory, but in order to do well with that information in the future, you have to sleep on it. You do not truly remember or learn anything until you have slept. That is when your brain stores something away for good. If you suffer from a lack of sleep, you are going to have trouble recalling important information you need for a test or at work.

A lack of sleep can also harm your health because your body needs the right amount of sleep to repair all of the things that have happened to it during the day. Your body heals all of the damage from the day, including getting rid of toxins and other things that you must remove from your system. Without this time, you are going to get sick more often and not feel as well as you could. A lack of sleep can show up in your skin and in the bags under your eyes too – not the look most of us are going to for.

Stress is something that is often attributed to a lack of sleep. This may have a lot to do with you giving not only your body but also your mind the down time it needs to relax. When you are tense, you may keep your muscles clenched whether you realize it or not. Sleep alleviates that. Your dreams are also something that help you deal with stress by working things out in your mind. A lack of sleep means a lack of dream time. If you are still clenching muscles while sleeping and your dreams are violent, you may need more than sleep to get rid of your stress though.

You can avoid a lack of sleep by figuring out how much you need to function at your peak. For some people this is as little as four hours a night (though that is rare), and some need as much as ten. Most people fall into the middle somewhere, with a lack of sleep occurring if they get less than eight to six hours a night. Sleep for a predetermined number of hours a night for a week and see how you feel. If you are not doing well, add an hour. If you find that you are doing well but feel as if you are sleeping too much, try to cut back an hour and see how it goes. You'll soon figure out what you need to be healthy, strong, and productive in your life.