Sleep Deprivation: What It Is, Symptoms, Treatment & Stages (2024)

What is sleep deprivation?

Sleep deprivation is when a person doesn’t get enough sleep. This can be a short-term issue, affecting one or a few nights, or it can be a chronic concern that lasts weeks or even months. Sleep deprivation can happen for countless reasons, many of them harmless, but it’s also a key symptom of certain health conditions.

Sleep is something that everyone needs, and most people need a similar amount, depending on their age. That amount also changes with age. However, some people need more sleep to feel well-rested, while others need less, but these exceptions aren’t common. A change in your sleep patterns, gradual or sudden, is a reason to talk to a healthcare provider.

The average daily amount of sleep needed, by age, is:

• Newborns (up to 3 months old): 14 to 17 hours.
• Infants (4 to 12 months old): 12 to 16 hours, including naptime.
• Young children (1 to 5 years old): 10 to 14 hours, including naptime.
• School-aged children (6 to 12 years old): 9 to 12 hours.
• Teenagers (13 to 18 years old): 8 to 10 hours.
• Adults (18 years and up): 7 to 9 hours.

Sleep deprivation can also take different forms. For some people, sleep deprivation happens because they stay awake instead of sleeping. For others, they’re still sleeping, but they aren’t getting quality sleep, so they still wake up feeling tired.

Sleep deprivation usually isn’t a major problem in limited, isolated amounts. However, research shows that chronic sleep deprivation can cause or contribute to a variety of health issues.

What is the difference between sleep deprivation and insomnia?

Insomnia and sleep deprivation are closely related but aren’t the same thing. Insomnia is when you’re unable to sleep when you try. Sleep deprivation is what happens when you don’t give yourself enough time to sleep don’t get enough sleep or both.

Who does it affect?

Sleep deprivation can happen to everyone at any point in their life.

How common is this condition?

Sleep deprivation is very common. Experts estimate between 50 million to 70 million adults in the U.S. meet the medical criteria for sleep deprivation at any point in time. Virtually every human being experiences sleep deprivation at some point in their life. For some people, it’s simply a greater or longer-lasting issue, or it happens for a more serious reason.

How does this condition affect my body?

Your body needs sleep to regenerate certain systems and carry out certain processes. To understand more about that, it helps to know a little more about the human sleep cycle. That cycle involves different stages of sleep. Those are:

• Stage 1: Light sleep. This is a short stage, usually no more than 5% of your total sleep, which begins right after you fall asleep.
• Stage 2: Deeper sleep. This stage is deeper and makes up about 45% of all the time you spend sleeping (this number goes up as you get older). Research indicates this stage is key in memory storage and learning.
• Stage 3: Deepest sleep. This stage makes up about 25% of the time you spend sleeping (this number goes down with age). There’s evidence that this stage is the most important to how your body recovers and maintains itself because the brain prioritizes this stage in people with sleep deprivation. It’s very hard to wake someone up from this stage, and they’ll usually feel foggy or confused for up to 30 minutes after waking up.
• REM sleep: REM stands for “rapid eye movement.” This stage is when you dream. When a person is in REM sleep, you can see their eyes moving beneath their eyelids.

When you fall asleep, you typically enter stage 1 and then move in and out of stages 2 and 3. After that, you go into REM sleep and start dreaming. After the first REM cycle, you start a new sleep cycle and go back into stage 1 or 2. One cycle normally takes about 90 to 120 minutes before another begins. Most people go through four or five cycles per night (assuming they get a full eight hours).

Systems affected

Sleep deprivation has negative effects in multiple ways throughout your body. Those can affect the following body systems, organs and processes:

• Heart and circulatory systems: Sleep deprivation has long-term damaging effects on your heart and circulatory health. People with chronic sleep deprivation are more likely to develop high blood pressure (hypertension) and high cholesterol (hyperlipidemia).
• Metabolic systems: People with chronic sleep deprivation are at a much higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
• Immune system: Your body’s natural defenses against infections can’t work properly if you aren’t getting enough sleep.
• Nervous system: It’s common for people who aren’t sleeping enough to have higher pain sensitivity, which means they feel pain more easily, the pain is more intense or both.
• Brain: Sleep deprivation has very negative effects on how your brain works. While experts don’t fully understand sleep’s role in brain function, they do know it’s a key part of how people learn and remember. There’s also some evidence that sleep deprivation could play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
• Mental health: Sleep deprivation also negatively affects your mental health, making it harder for you to manage and process your emotions. People with sleep deprivation are more likely to feel symptoms of depression and anxiety.

The effects of sleep deprivation depend on why it happens and how long it lasts. The longer a person has sleep deprivation, the greater — and more severe — the effects.

Conditions that can get worse or happen because of sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation also increases your risk of developing certain conditions or making them worse if you have them. These conditions include:

• Type 2 diabetes.
• High blood pressure (hypertension).
• Obesity.
• Obstructive sleep apnea.
• Vascular disease.
• Stroke.
• Heart attack.
• Depression.
• Anxiety.
• Conditions that involve psychosis.