Can Skipping Rest Age You Faster? Find Out Here

We live in a world where no days off are labelled as an achievement or stairway to success. Whether it's staying up all night to get a project done, regularly skipping rest days at the gym, or existing on four hours of sleep to fit more into your life, the considered underlined message is often that rest is for the weak.

However, what if all this relentless activity is actually deteriorating your long-term health and vitality? According to studies, chronic skimping rest, particularly on sleep, does more than simply draining you and it might actually be speeding up your biological ageing. They also highlight that rest is not a luxury; it's a need, necessary to maintain cells and longevity.

What Happens When You Skip Rest

To understand better, we reached out to our expert, Shrey Kumar Srivastav, Senior Consultant and General Physician, Sharda Hospital - Noida, and he explained to us that the deepest and most harmful type of sleep deprivation is chronic loss of sleep. “When you are awake, cells in your body collect wear and tear, primarily because of oxidative stress, which is a natural consequence of metabolic processes. It is during deep sleep that the vital repair team steps into action,” he shared. Here's how lack of quality sleep can force your body into premature ageing:

1. DNA Damage Accumulation

Our DNA, i.e., the genetic instructions for all of the cells in our body is bombarded continuously by free radicals. During sleep, particularly the slow-wave Non-REM (NREM) phases, our cells trigger high-tech DNA repair processes. When we cut short your sleep, we in turn break this nightly maintenance cycle.

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The Age Connection: Research suggests that sleep loss can increase DNA damage and decrease expression of genes related to DNA repair. This built-up, especially when uncorrected, can damage over time, is a significant cause of cellular ageing and raises the risk for chronic diseases.

2. Accelerated Brain Ageing

“Consider sleep a very important wash cycle for your brain. During sleep, the glymphatic system (the brain's special waste-removal system) is much more active. It cleans out neurotoxins, such as beta-amyloid, a protein highly linked to Alzheimer's disease,” Dr Srivastav pointed out.

The Age Connection: In a study of young adults who had experienced complete sleep deprivation (24+ hours of wakefulness), their brains looked functionally older (up to one to two years) when compared with an MRI. Although this is reversible with recovery sleep, the results highlight the acute stress that insufficient sleep puts on brain structure and function, especially when accumulated over months or years.

3. Broken Hormonal Balance

Sleep is essential to balance an array of hormones vital for youth function. Such as:

• Growth Hormone (GH): GH is known as the fountain of youth hormone, which allows for repair of tissues, growth of muscle and bones, peaks during deep sleep. Lack of sleep drastically limits its release.
• Cortisol (The Stress Hormone): Cortisol levels should be lowest at night. Constant lack of sleep maintains elevated cortisol levels, boosting inflammation and tissue breakdown (catabolism), essentially speeding up ageing and compromising the immune system.

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Why Rest Days Are More Than a Mental Break

“Sleep is not the only thing; physical rest and recovery days are just as important, particularly for physically active individuals,” said Dr Srivastav. This is because of the following reasons:

1. Muscle Hypertrophy and Repair

During exercise, we cause small tears in your muscle fibres. Muscle growth (hypertrophy) does not occur when you are lifting, but during rest time, when the body repairs the tears using protein and human growth hormone, making the muscle stronger. Avoiding rest prevents this essential rebuilding process.

2. Inflammation Regulation

Severe exercise induces inflammation. Rest days give the body a natural chance to decrease this inflammation and restore vital energy reserves i.e. glycogen. Chronic overtraining maintains the body in heightened stress and inflammation, which is synonymous with rapid biological ageing.

Bottomline

Seeing rest as an unavoidable aspect of your health routine is the best investment you can make in your longevity. It's during these quiet, restorative times that the body performs the necessary cellular housekeeping, repair, and renewal to slow biological ageing.