I Slept 8 Hours A Day For 30 Days And Noticed This

I’m not a doctor, it’s just my story

I have a complicated love/hate relationship with sleep. I want more of it in the mornings. I can’t stand it in the evenings. Sometimes I want it and it doesn’t want me and other times I try to resist but it’s just too tempting. I’m not alone and I know there are many people who are like me. Sleep is never simple.

A recent study showed that 7.5 million British people are getting less than five hours sleep per night. I thought that was pretty shocking until I realised that at least one night per week, I was getting less than five hours. It was very rare that I got a full eight hours straight. The same study found that 71 percent of Brits are like me. They get less than the recommended seven to nine hours.

When the health benefits of sleep are so well-documented, why aren’t we prioritising it? What could possibly be more important than our health? I’m not going to list all those benefits here because this is a story about what happened to me personally when I got the recommended amount for a significant period of time and how that changed my body but if you do want to read further on that, I’ve included some links below at the end of this story.

I became more tired initially

The first thing I noticed was that I was more tired. How could that be? How could sleeping more make me more tired? Well, I don’t use caffeine at all so I think I must have been running on pure adrenaline for many years, which is quite scary. I hate to think of the damage that I’ve done to my adrenals in that time.

As the experiment progressed, I noticed that this sorted itself out. I became less sleepy and started to feel more like my usual self. That took less than a week.

My stomach liked it

I suffer from GERD which is chronic and significant reflux issues. I’m not saying they disappeared, but they reduced by a lot by the end of the experiment. My stomach felt more comfortable, everything was more manageable and I was eating lasagne again, which I hadn’t done for a long time. I even had a couple of nights where I didn’t have to take my medication.

I started to sweat more?

This is a really strange one but I’ve noticed that I sweat more and it’s, shall we say… fragrant? So I have to take more showers and use extra scented products. I wasn’t sure why this would happen but I found this study that says:

sleep-deprived women lose heat rapidly in response to a mild cooling stimulus

So, lack of sleep means that your body temperature will decrease easily if you’re a woman. In fact, to me, it sounds very bad if this becomes chronic. I did notice a while back when we were taking temperatures in my house on a daily basis to check we didn’t have COVID 19 that my temperature was 0.2 degrees cooler than everyone else’s. I thought I was just one of those people who runs cold.

So, maybe things are sorting themselves out now and my body temperature is changing. Will that mean I am less likely to get coughs and colds? I hope so, although it’s probably not that simple.

The anxiety was still there but easier to manage

I’ve been suffering with chronic anxiety all my adult life. Panic attacks are my normal default setting these days. It’s not a great situation to be in day in, day out. It doesn’t matter how much CBT I get, or how much soothing music I listen to. I can’t green juice and meditate myself better.

I can also say that the increased sleeping time didn’t make the anxiety magically go away, but when I did have a panic attack, I could deal with it more easily. I had more focus and I was able to reign it in more easily.

I liked that. I liked it a lot.

I was hornier

I mean, I could just have left this out but why bother when this is one of the things that happened to me and it was enough of an increase in libido for me to actually notice it and think that something had changed.

I could Google that and find a study that backs it up but I’m not going to. I’m just going to enjoy feeling sexier and not overthink it.

I will be trying to keep this up and make sure that at least five nights out of seven, I get around seven to eight hours of sleep. It would be interesting to re-visit this in a year’s time and see if I’ve managed to keep getting more sleep and what the effects of it have been.

Have you ever tried to get more sleep? What did it do to you?

Other websites you might want to read about the health benefits of more sleep: