Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to one’s overall health. Not only does it improve cognitive function, but it can also enhance one’s athletic performance as well. It can also highly impact the way you look, backing up the conception behind the term “beauty sleep.” So one has to wonder, does a lack of sleep truly make a difference in the way people look?
The men behind AsapSCIENCE, Greg and Mitch, decided to indulge in an experiment and post it on their YouTube channel. They stayed awake for 36 hours and took photos of themselves every six hours to see whether a lack of sleep would actually make a difference to the way they look.
Greg shared, “Scientists don’t actually know why we look so messed up when we don’t sleep,” citing two of the most popular theories from evolutionary biology to explain why.
Apparently, the first theory explains that when the body is sleep-deprived, your immune system becomes weaker and you’re more prone to getting into accidents. When you’re in this weakened state, your face shows it too, allowing others to know that they need to avoid you. As for the second theory, it suggests that when someone is sleep deprived, they are also more pessimistic, which lessens their ability to show emotion on their face.
During the experiment, Mitch noted that around the 14-hour of being awake, which was roughly around the 4 a.m. mark, he could already feel his cognitive abilities begin to impede and slow down. He explained, “Any time you’re trying to learn or remember something, an area in your brain called the hippocampus is really active, it’s basically taking in all the information and processing it for you.”
“But when they look at brain scans of people who are sleep-deprived, the hippocampus is basically off. On top of that, the proteins that are required to actually build connections between neurons are no longer available when you’re overtired, and so effectively, it’s really hard to even make a memory, physically,” he added.
As the sun rose again the next day of their experiment, both Mitch and Greg felt somewhat re-energized, probably due to their bodies trying to ‘reassert their circadian rhythms.’
Mitch shared, “As the sun comes up, your body starts to produce hormones that are in sync with the daylight, which wakes your body up.” But despite the slight rise in energy, that second wind doesn’t actually last, since the adenosine levels are incredibly high, causing the lack of sleep to begin to show on their faces.
By the time the 36-hours was up, both men looked notably different. In fact, Greg’s face appeared to be inflamed even. Greg exclaimed, “I look so sad! I would 100% stay away from the person on the right.” Meanwhile, Mitch looked quite unhappy as well, with noticeable lines around his eyes from attempting to stay awake and keep his eyes from closing.
In the end, the video of their experiment is quite straightforward, proving that getting a proper night’s sleep is very important when it comes to appearance. Not only does it highly impact how you look, but it also proved that without a good night’s rest, it is pretty difficult to function on a normal level throughout the day.