Interrupted Sleep: What Happens To Your Body

Get bored easily? Try a setup with a wide variety of furniture. Instead of two small sofas facing one another (as in the traditional layout), situate two chairs across from a chaise longue. Place two stools across from a single large sofa to complete a square layout. While it seems like white kitchens have been…

Mindy always gives great interviews, but a recent New York Times interview stood out; here are some fun quotes:

Originally, all photography was monochrome, or black-and-white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its “classic” photo graphic look.

While many of us start our days with a bowl of cereal, Swift puts a little more effort into her mornings, making buckwheat pancakes topped with ham, Parm, and a fried egg, she tells Bon Appetit. She also downs a glass of OJ every day.

There’s a reason that yogis always seem so upbeat and well rested: Practicing sun salutations, downward dogs, and other poses can be a great, natural way to improve sleep. And you don’t have to be a pro to benefit. People with insomnia who do yoga daily for at least eight weeks fall asleep faster and get more sleep at night.

Yoga may also be able to help if work, relationship, or other angst is keeping you awake long past bedtime. In fact, over 85 percent of people who practice yoga say that it cuts down on stress. So what are you waiting for? Pull out a yoga mat, grab a water bottle, and stretch and bend your way to better sleep with these moves.

Your Brain Isn’t as Sharp. When you wake up throughout the night, your cognitive ability (how fast you can think) and your attention span suffer as much as if you barely slept at all. This helps explain why driving when tired is so dangerous—you can’t react as quickly as you normally would to things like a car suddenly breaking in front of you.

You Can’t Remember Things. When sleep isn’t continuous, it’s much harder to learn new skills and make new memories. This also goes for things that you learned the day before a bad night of sleep—your brain needs a long stretch of sleep to commit what you recently learned to memory. It’s not the total amount of sleep that’s important, it’s that the time asleep wasn’t regularly interrupted.

Amyloid proteins, which are linked to Alzheimer’s disease, get removed from your brain when you get a good night’s sleep. But when people regularly have nights of interrupted sleep, brain imaging shows a buildup of those proteins.

Waking up throughout the night makes you a lot crankier the next day, unsurprisingly. Being roused from sleep just a few times each night is enough to increase the chances of developing depression.

There are lots of reasons why you might spend a restless night waking up every few hours, checking the clock, and feeling disappointed that it’s still nowhere near morning. Maybe there’s a new baby who has to be fed regularly, a sick dog who needs frequent trips to the backyard, neighbors who have rocking parties, or just a racing brain that makes staying asleep tough.

Whatever the cause, you’re bound to wake up tired the next morning. But that’s not all. There are a few other ways that waking up often throughout the night affects your physical and mental health.