Burning the candle at both ends does more damage than just the bags under your eyes. Deirdre Panapa from DP Herbals explains why a good night’s sleep is one of the best supplements at your disposal.

Ernest Hemingway is thought to have said “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”

When I was a nurse it was expected that we did shift work. For many years I slept when the sun was bright and worked very hard through the night only to do a morning shift the next day. I was lucky, I thought; I could sleep anywhere, anytime. But looking back on the photos, it is clear that the person attempting to smile back looked as if she needed a good long nap.

Sleep is one of the few things that is crucial to life, and yet it is left to you to regulate it independently. Adults require slightly longer than eight hours of sleep per night. It is believed that regularly sleeping less than seven hours per night is associated with adverse health outcomes, including weight gain and obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke, depression, and increased risk of death. If we chose door ‘B’, sleeping less than seven hours per night is also associated with impaired immune function, increased pain, impaired performance, increased errors, and greater risk of accidents. 

Serious business long term – downright scary! However, for the majority of us the symptoms of lack of sleep can be seen and felt on a somewhat acceptable level.

Your complexion suffers because everyone needs beauty sleep. Recent research found that sleep-deprived people suffer premature skin ageing and a decrease in the skin's ability to recover after exposure to the sun. Signs include fine lines, uneven pigmentation, slackening of skin and reduced elasticity.

You cannot think straight (what?). Poor sleep reduces the ability to make decisions and increases the risk of making mistakes. We may also suffer a loss of memory and any routine tasks involving problem-solving and time-management skills will become even more difficult to carry out.

A lack of quality sleep can lead to stress, which means the body makes more of the stress hormone cortisol, and this will increase inflammation.

Feeling uninspired, tired, weepy and short-tempered? In order to function properly and efficiently, the brain needs us to sleep so it can reorder thought processes and assess the day's events and our experiences of them.

You're hungry and piling on the weight? If the brain is not getting the energy it needs from sleep, it will often try to get it from food. Scientists also found that a shortened four and a half hours of sleep for four days straight can reduce our fat cells' ability to respond to insulin (the hormone responsible for regulating energy) by 30%.

You are impulsive. We have all had those moments of impulse buys and desires. Think about it: do you find yourself online, buying lots of products you don’t need late at night?

So, give it a go! Promise yourself in 2021 to reintroduce good sleep to your life. No join-up fees, no deliveries, no sign-ups. Your body will work better because of it and you will look fabulous, too.

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