. But, as many of us know all too well, the best New Year's intentions to get fit, lose weight, eat more nutritiously, stress less and save more money can easily fall to the wayside. And often do, considering only about 8 percent of people successfully achieve their resolutions, according to University of Scranton Research.
However, it could be that the reason all your other resolutions are failing -- and the reason you're having trouble making sound food choices or keeping weight off to begin with -- is you're ignoring a simple yet powerful component of total health: sleep.
Sleep, Hunger & Weight Gain
Could lack of sleep be causing you to gain weight?Think about it: If you’re feeling sleepy at work, you may be tempted to reach for a cup of coffee (or several cups) and a doughnut for a quick shot of energy. Later you may skip the gym and pick up takeout on your way home to your family -- no time to cook. When you finally find yourself back in your bed, you are too wound up to sleep. Getting too little sleep often makes people feel hungrier than normal, leading to overeating and weight gain. A study in the journal Sleep found a biological reason for this that surprised the researchers. Lack of sleep triggers hormonal changes, but the hormones affected are different for men and women, the study found. The researchers said they expected sleep deprivation to affect glucose or insulin levels in both sexes.
It may be that people who skimp on sleep simply have more opportunity to eat. Short sleepers who stay up late seem to be more likely to consume late-night snacks and more calories in general. Fatigue also seems to cloud the mind in a way that makes it more difficult to select nutritious food options and easier to fill grocery carts with high-calorie, impulse buys. And on top of it all, not getting enough sleep seems to trigger hunger, likely due to an imbalance of the hormones that control those pangs. In a small 2012 study, researchers found that short sleep increased levels of ghrelin, which triggers hunger, in men, and lowered levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone called GLP-1 in women, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sleep & Memory
Want to remember something? Sleep on it. A study finds that the more we value a piece of information the more likely we’ll review it during our sleep. And because we do that, we’ll tend to remember it. In addition to aiding in memory, sleep also plays and essential role in learning new information. In one study, researchers found that depriving students of sleep after learning a new skill significantly decreased memory of that skill up to three days later.
Sleep & Longevity.
Most of us know the effects that poor sleep has on us the next day: We feel drowsy, our memory banks don't work so well and we struggle to perform routine mental and even physical tasks. However, we rarely take notice of the long-term effects and the impact on our longevity because these are more subtle, and we've become accustomed to sleeping poorly. We slowly pack on the pounds and suffer more from common colds and the flu without connecting our poor sleep habits to our growing number of ailments. People who regularly got less than six hours of sleep a night were 12 percent more likely to die over a 25-year period than people who slept between six and eight hours a night, according to a study published in the journal SLEEP, the BBC reported.
So What Can You Do?
It's as good a time as ever to commit to more -- or simply better -- sleep. Try making a sleep resolution this year, like pledging to leave your phone outside the bedroom or to finally talk to your doc about your snoring. Or maybe this is the year you stop saying things like, "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" and start prioritizing your shut-eye just like you do your gym time.
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