Everyone knows they should sleep more. That part is not news.
What gets missed is how fast the damage shows up. Researchers can put a number on most of it. They took healthy people, took sleep away from them, and wrote down what happened.
Here is what they found.
Your brain slows down first
Australian researchers kept people awake for 28 hours. Then they gave them the same tests those people had already done after drinking alcohol.
After 17 to 19 hours awake, scores on some tests were as bad as a blood alcohol reading of 0.05. On a few of them, reaction speed was up to 50 percent slower.
In Australia, 0.05 is the legal limit for driving.
If you get up at 6am, 17 hours puts you at 11pm. That is a normal Tuesday night for a lot of people.
One thing is worth saying plainly. That study measured test scores in a lab, and it did not track real crashes. What it shows is that your brain slows down hours before you feel wrecked.
Your training gets worse
Stanford ran a study on their men's basketball team. Eleven players spent five to seven weeks aiming for 10 hours in bed each night. On average they picked up just under two extra hours of sleep.
Their sprint times dropped from 16.2 seconds to 15.5 seconds.
Their free throws went up 9 percent. Their three-pointers went up 9 percent as well.
Their training stayed the same the whole time. The extra sleep was the only change, and every single player improved.
You get hungrier
This one catches people out.
A 2022 trial in JAMA Internal Medicine took 80 adults who normally slept under 6.5 hours. They were given some simple advice on sleeping better. They ended up sleeping about 1.2 hours more each night.
They then ate around 270 fewer calories a day. No one put them on a diet or told them what to eat. They slept more and ate less without trying.
If you are working on your weight, short sleep pushes against you every night you have one.
It reaches your hormones
A study in JAMA took ten healthy young men. They were held to five hours of sleep a night for one week.
Their daytime testosterone dropped 10 to 15 percent.
One week.
These were fit young men, around 24 years old, with nothing wrong with them going in. That is how fast the body starts trimming what it thinks it can do without.
You get sick more often
Researchers at UCSF did something most studies cannot. They tracked how much 164 healthy people slept for a week. Then they put the common cold virus up their noses and watched who came down with it.
People sleeping under 5 hours were 4.5 times more likely to get sick than people on 7 hours or more. The 5 to 6 hour group were 4.2 times more likely.
The 6 to 7 hour group were no worse off than the 7 hour group. So there seems to be a line, and it sits somewhere around 6 hours.
Sleep predicted who got sick better than age, stress or income did.
You get hurt more often
Doctors followed 112 young athletes for 21 months. They matched every injury against how much each athlete slept.
The ones averaging under 8 hours a night were 1.7 times more likely to get injured.
That is a big number to carry through a whole season.
What actually helps
Almost none of this needs anything you have to buy.
- Go to bed and get up at close to the same time, weekends included. Your body runs on a clock and it likes a routine.
- Get daylight on your face in the morning. That light sets the clock that decides when you feel sleepy at night.
- Stop caffeine in the early afternoon. Half of it is still in you about five hours later, long after you stop feeling it.
- Keep the room dark and on the cool side.
- Put the phone out of arm's reach.
Do those five and you have most of it covered. The hard part is doing them on the nights you cannot be bothered.
Where Fortify PM fits
We built Fortify PM for that last part, which is the bit people struggle to keep up.
It is a sugar-free drink you have before bed. It is built around magnesium glycinate and ashwagandha to support restful sleep and overnight recovery.
Chocolate is made to drink warm with hot water or warm milk. Strawberry Pineapple is made for cold water. There are 30 serves in a tub and it takes about two minutes to make.
There is no melatonin in it. It supports your own sleep, so the morning still belongs to you.
We formulate and make it ourselves in Brisbane.
We also wrote about why we picked this form of magnesium. It covers how we got it tasting like a real hot chocolate: Why we use magnesium glycinate in Fortify PM.
Where these numbers come from
- Williamson AM, Feyer AM. Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2000.
- Mah CD et al. The effects of sleep extension on the athletic performance of collegiate basketball players. SLEEP, 2011.
- Tasali E et al. Effect of sleep extension on objectively assessed energy intake among adults with overweight in real-life settings. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2022.
- Leproult R, Van Cauter E. Effect of 1 week of sleep restriction on testosterone levels in young healthy men. JAMA, 2011.
- Prather AA et al. Behaviorally assessed sleep and susceptibility to the common cold. SLEEP, 2015.
- Milewski MD et al. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. Journal of Pediatric Orthopaedics, 2014.
