When the problem isn’t your relationship

Your partner is grumpy and moody. Little things become big things quickly.  Is he depressed? Is something wrong with your relationship? Or is it just that she isn’t getting enough sleep?

We tend to take sleep for granted, and feel that we can rise above the feeling of being tired. There is no escaping the data, however.  When we are tired:

• We are more likely to be angry or violent
• Our mood can be affected (making us look depressed and anxious, or just plain up and down moody)
• Our concentration, memory, and performance are compromised
• We are more accident prone (because sleepiness makes us less alert, slower to react, and bad at decision making)
• We are more likely to get sick due to the affect sleep has on our immune system

Most of us are in huge denial about the cost of sleepiness and its affects on us.  Since our body normally “wakes us up” twice a day (one of these times is in the evening) we are lulled into thinking that we just had a temporary feeling of tiredness. We also think that sleeping in on a Saturday will get us back on track.

Unfortunately the affects of losing sleep are cumulative—meaning that over time the sleep you lose builds up on you.  You carry the weight of all the sleep you’ve lost over the last two weeks (and maybe more) in your brain right now.  It is called “sleep debt.”  Sleep debt is the reason you can sleep 10 hours on a Friday night and still feel tired on Saturday.  You might think you are tired because you slept too much, but in fact the problem is that your body hasn’t caught up on all the other hours you missed over the last few weeks.

When we have a big sleep debt we are chronically tired.  And that means we are also many of the other things listed above (like a danger on the road, moody, irritable, or just plain out-to-lunch.) And the performance we think we are gaining by staying up those extra hours?  Not there—in tests people’s performance decreased by huge amounts when they were deprived of sleep—but ironically they thought they were still doing fine.

What makes it even worse?  Your sleepy brain on just a tiny amount of alcohol can be as impaired as if you were legally drunk.  Yep, you heard right—one glass of wine on top of sleepiness and your chances of being in an accident go through the roof.

Sleep loss can have a serious impact on a relationship, your health, and your quality of life.  It can look like depression, being checked out, bad judgment, irritability, or impulsivity. You can wreck a marriage with lack of sleep.

Do you need more sleep to be your best self? If I put you in a dark room right after a no-caffeine morning and lunch, would you fall asleep within 20 minutes? Out of 100 people who say they aren’t tired, 80 actually are. Are you one of them?