Sleeping After Midnight - Effects on Your Body and Health

What Happens When You Regularly Sleep After Midnight: A Health Guide

Does Your Body Know When to Go to Bed?

It helps our brains with the internal biological clock to monitor the timing of when we need to be awake and when we need to sleep. It does this by regulating our sleep but also gives signals of becoming alert or sleepy due to light changes in our surroundings, so a behaviour in some ways almost like sunrises and sunsets do. This behaviour has been there for thousands of years and is shaped by the Earth's rotation on its axis. Without a circadian rhythm, we are not able to optimize how much energy our bodies expend and when. It helps maintain all the facets of our lives.

• The circadian rhythm uses sunlight that hits the eye to keep us aligned on a 24-hour schedule. Light hitting our eyes makes the brain suppress melatonin, one of the primary hormones involved in regulating sleep.
• Melatonin is a signal hormone for your body to go to sleep. Rohrscheib adds that when evening progresses and less light information comes through our eyes, our melatonin production increases linearly until it hits a threshold, at which point it signals to the brain that it's time to sleep.
• Generally speaking, this melatonin signal occurs way before midnight. The more we are awake beyond this point, the more we disrupt our natural sleep pattern. When we travel across time zones, this gets mixed up. Environmental cues, resulting from temperature and light levels, interact with the circadian timer to tell the body what time it is.

What Happens When You Sleep After Midnight Regularly

1 Disrupted Sleep Cycle:

The human body is wired to the natural circadian rhythm—the internal biological clock creating the individual sleep/wake cycles in consideration of light exposure. As such, if you continue to oversleep, you create that rhythm offbeat, which makes it much harder to fall asleep and wake refreshed, even when you get the exact number of hours of rest. Such a sleep debt will have you tired, irritable, and foggy-headed throughout the day.

2 Dreaming:

It is during REM sleep that dreaming is most frequent and most vivid, however it can also occur during other stages of sleep. That being said, they do tend to take on different patterns in non-REM and REM sleep with REM dreams normally being more fantastic, vivid, or surreal.

3 Weakened Immune System:

Sleep plays a role in your body's immune response. During deep sleep, your body produces cytokines, proteins that help fight infection and inflammation. If you continue to get too little sleep over time, you also hinder the production of cytokines and, thereby, are more likely to catch colds, the flu, and other illnesses.

4 Heart Rate:

As with breathing rate, heart rate mediates in Stage 1 and continues further down to the slowest point during Stage 3. In contrast, after parasympathetic stimulation during REM sleep, the pulse increases to near waking rates.

5 Increased Risk of Weight Gain:

This could have a ghastly effect on hormones like leptin and ghrelin, which control hunger and fullness. After sleep deprivation, the level of leptin falls down, so now you do not feel full. At the same time, the level of ghrelin increases, looking for some unhealthy, high-calorie crude food to quench these crazy cravings. This hormonal imbalance may contribute to weight gain over time.

6 Muscle Tone:

Muscles relax progressively during each stage of non-REM sleep, and the body's overall energy expenditure decreases. During REM, almost all the muscles are paralyzed during what is called atonia. This prevents thrashing of the legs and arms, acting out dream content. Respiratory and eye muscles remain active, however, and the moving of the eyes under closed eyelids is the source of the term rapid eye movement sleep.

7 Poor performance of the brain:

It rejuvenates memory and helps process new information. Lack of sleep will make it hard for the brain to process information quickly, hence affecting concentration, memory, and decision-making. It hence affects working performance, academic excellence, and general productivity.

8 Brain Waves:

When measured during sleep, brain waves exhibit distinct patterns that correspond to each of the different stages of sleep. During the more superficial early parts of non-REM sleep, brain waves slow dramatically; though during Stage 2 and Stage 3 there are many brief surges of brain activity.

During REM sleep, the activity of the brain gets accelerated with different, radically different types of brain waves. This increased activity in the brain is what has led to REM being referred to as the stage most firmly associated with vivid dreaming. 

9 Runs a risk of contracting chronic diseases:

Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with increased risks for chronic disease processes, including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Some of this relates to the hormonal changes sleep disruption produces that can impact blood sugar regulation, metabolism, and inflammation.

10 Respiration:

Respirations decrease during non-REM sleep, with respirations at their lowest during deep sleep stage three. Respiration increases and can also become variable during REM sleep.

11 Hormone Levels:

It will help to sleep, and the body's internal clock, called the circadian rhythm, helps to control the release of many hormones like:

•  Melatonin induces sleep
•  Growth hormone develops bone and muscle and aids metabolism
•  Cortisol, a hormone in the body's stress reaction system
•  Leptin and ghrelin are considered to be involved in the physiological regulation of appetite.

Hormone levels fluctuate over different stages of sleep, but sleep quality may have an independent effect on its production during the day.

Conclusion

When life becomes really busy, you cannot make it to bed on time every single night. But even if that's the case, it's important that you attempt to get into bed before midnight.

If you have done all the right things regarding lifestyle changes and your sleep does not seem to improve, contact your doctor or schedule a consultation at an accredited nonprofit sleep facility nearest you.