Most of us get an occasional bad night's sleep or we make ourselves tired by staying up way too late. But how many days in a row does it take before it starts to truly take a toll on your brain? Researchers at the University of South Florida looked into it and found things go downhill pretty quickly.
2,000 people tracked their sleep for over a week and research shows that even just one night of poor sleep had a huge effect on their mental and physical wellbeing. They define poor sleep as getting less than six hours a night.
Things got worse if they didn't sleep well for two nights in a row and got even worse after three nights. But then it leveled off for a few days.
After night three, our bodies start to adapt to less sleep. So, getting four or five nights of bad sleep in a row doesn't make us feel that much worse than three. But then things change again...
People really hit a wall after six nights of poor sleep in a row. That's when they said they felt their worst physically.
In other words, some us can deal with three, four, or even five restless nights, but that's the limit. Even after one bad night of sleep, people were more likely to feel lonely, angry, nervous, frustrated, and irritable.
