Getting the right amount of sleep, both in quantity and quality, is extremely important to healthy body and brain function. Sleep loss or chronic sleep disruptions can lead to the following negative effects.

Sleep is involved in repairing blood vessels and healing and repairing functions of the heart. Chronic sleep deprivation is correlated with a higher risk of long-term health issues like heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.

Sleep helps with the maintenance of hormones that help you feel hungry and full. When you don't get enough sleep or have a lot of sleep disruptions, these hormones can grow unbalanced. This is thought to be the reason for the correlation between sleep deprivation and risk of obesity.

The efficiency of your immune system relies on sleep. Without quality sleep, your body's ability to fight off infections suffers significantly.

Sleep plays a major role in the maintenance of hormones that affect your mood and behavior.

Sleep deficiency is associated with difficulty making decisions, solving problems, and coping with change. All of these can affect your mood and behavior.

Sleep deprivation has been linked to suicide, depression, and risky behavior.

Sleep deficiency can also limit activity in parts of the brain that deal with emotional regulation. As a consequence, many people who are sleep deprived, have significant difficulties controlling emotions and behavior.

Adolescent athletes who do not get the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep on a regular basis are nearly 2x more likely to get injured than those getting the recommended amount of sleep.

Athletes who are sleep deprived are at a higher risk for sustaining a musculoskeletal injury (injury of bone, muscles, tendon, ligaments, or nerves) than those who do not experience daytime fatigue.

A lack of sleep makes it significantly more difficult for athletes to manage the workload of training sessions, travel schedules, classes, and work. This inability to tolerate higher intensity workloads can contribute to increased risk of injury from either lack of fitness or developing an overuse injury.

Sleep also helps growth hormones which help tissue repairs and regeneration. Sleep also lowers the body's need for oxygen while decreasing the amount of energy needed for digestion. This allows the body to focus its energy towards building proteins and transporting free fatty acids. These all contribute to lowering the risk for injury and supporting your body's healing process. Without sleep, these systems begin to suffer.

Shorter sleep duration and an irregular sleep-wake schedule are significantly correlated with a lower GPA.

One major reason that researchers notice this correlation between sleep patterns and academics is because of sleep's relationship with learning. As you sleep, your brain creates new, and strengthens previous, neuropathways from the day you just had. This affects your retention of concepts in your classes, muscle memory, and information from training sessions. Better sleep is associated with better retention and therefore, better academic and athletic performance.

Sleep also helps with your attention span, problem-solving skills, your ability to make decisions, and your creativity.