How Pulling An All-Nighter Messes Up Your Body

There are two opposing hormones in your body that regulate your appetite — leptin and ghrelin. In individuals who lack sleep, the body produces less leptin and more ghrelin which makes you hungrier.

Scientists from Stanford and the University of Wisconsin noticed that after one night of little to no sleep, a person's body mass index increases.

According to study in the US National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health, sleep deprivation affects your brain's frontal lobes, slowing down their communications.

In terms of concentration that means you are impairing your spacial, auditory and visual attention. And forget about doing anything monotonous for a long period of time.

Working memory can be divided into four subsystems: phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer and central executive. The phonological loop is assumed to temporarily store verbal and acoustic information (echo memory); the sketchpad, to hold visuospatial information (iconic memory), and the episodic buffer to integrate information from several different sources.

All of those are connected to how well your frontal lobe works, and that takes a hit when you don't sleep.

Scientists tested subjects for speed and accuracy after an all-nighter. They found, because of their inability to concentrate, that subjects had to be fast or accurate. They were unable to do both.

Sleep deprivation adversely affects a part of your brain called the thalamus which, along with the medial temporal lobes, regulates your ability to recognize others.

Face recognition relies on the thalamus, but verbal memory relies on the prefrontal cortex, which is adversely affected during sleep deprivation.

According to a UC Berkeley study, sleep deprivation boosts the parts of your brain that are associated with depression and cause you to overreact to negative experiences. It also hampers the prefrontal lobe (as you know) which helps to regulate emotion.

The American Diabetes Association says that lack of sleep can increase blood sugar levels by decreasing insulin production.

Studies show that sleep deprivation suppresses the immune system and impairs our fever response.

It can even make us less responsive to vaccines (from WebMD):

John Park, MD, a pulmonologist who specializes in sleep medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., agrees. “We know that our immune response is suppressed when we are sleep deprived and that we develop less antibodies to certain vaccines if we are sleep-deprived,” Park says. “It takes longer for our body to respond to immunizations, so if we are exposed to a flu virus, we may be more likely to get sick than if we are well rested when vaccinated.”

This Is What Adderall Does To Your Body>