Are Your Hormones Keeping You Up At Night?

Sleep and hormones work in tandem to keep our bodies moving and grooving – when they’re out of sync, so are we! Here’s how hormones influence your sleep, how sleep influences your hormones, and where weight loss fits into it all.

- Charis Torrance

Sleep. Without it we’re grouchy and foggy. Lack of sleep makes us emotionally fragile… and fat. But when we’re well-rested, we feel as though we can do anything.

Back in the day, people tended to wear sleep deprivation as a badge of honour: many of us bought into the rock ’n’ roll idea of ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ These days, we know it isn’t that simple.

‘Some people would like to say that we sleep less than we used to do 80 years ago,’ says Dr Dale Rae, director of Sleep Science and a senior researcher at the University of Cape Town. ‘They’ll point to changes in lifestyle, like increased technology, as the cause.’ But, she adds, there really isn’t much evidence to back that up.

‘What’s more likely is that we’re just more aware of it,’ says Dr Fiona Baker, director of the Human Sleep Research Program at SRI International in California, USA. ‘More and more people are talking about the effects of sleep deprivation, and in turn there’s more research into it.’

We now know that many of our critical bodily functions are linked to sleep – especially when it comes to our hormones.

THINGS THAT KEEP US AWAKE