Can Sleep Affect Hair Growth? - 3 Reasons Why it Does
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Table of Contents
The Importance of Sleep
Your sleep pattern is one of the most important things in your life. It dictates how much energy you have in a day, which in turn affects how well you do anything else. How well you can perform tasks based on energy is directly related to your mood, and your mood one day can affect your mood for the rest of your week. The slippery slope can be slid down this way. Your sleep ruins your day, your ruined day is remembered throughout your week, and as time drags on, your daily functioning is affected to the point that your health starts deteriorating.
How does anything have to do with the question: can sleep affect hair growth? Well, everything that relates to how well your body functions can technically be related to the way your hair grows. Maintaining your health is easiest when you get a good night’s rest, and your body in turn will reflect on your health.
How Can Sleep Affect Hair Growth
So, how can sleep affect hair growth, and by how much? The answer can vary depending on the overall health of the individual, but there are three ways in which it is scientifically proven that sleep can affect how much hair you can have.
1. Sleep affects your hormones
Sleep is essential to the recycling and regulation of the hormones that circulate throughout your body during the day and at night. When speaking of hormones affected by sleep, the list is extremely long and many of them are important to maintaining your health and growth. If you do not maintain a consistent sleep schedule and have normal hormone levels, a variety of health deficits can arise because you are both vulnerable and unstable.
For starters, cortisol, the hormone for stress, is a naturally occurring hormone in your body that is produced under stressful conditions you face when you are awake, but also produced by your body to maintain chemical balance in your body. When you do not sleep, you are putting your body under a level of stress that not only increases the amount of cortisol you have in your body, but also offsets the natural chemical balance of cortisol that is supposed to be in your body. This causes a chain reaction in your body when it comes to the maintenance of other hormones, such as ones that regulate anxiety, hunger, muscle fatigue, and hair growth.
When your hormones are out of control, you’ll find yourself in a weakened body that cannot properly formulate responses to threats such as illness and it will be difficult to adapt to any strain. This includes strain on your scalp, for your hair follicles, will likely be weaker just like your body is from the lack of sleep, and thus you will lose hair easily and it will be harder to grow back.
2. Sleep affects your diet
When you sleep, your body goes into a resting state that slows down your metabolism, which means your digestion slows and your body burns less energy. In this way, you are not wasting excess energy and you are restoring your body’s natural reserves of energy. If you do not sleep, or if you sleep irregularly, your body will start to first feel the effects of this through a lack of energy because you are not restoring your energy, then you will begin to eat irregularly in order to restore that energy.
When you eat irregularly, you may experience changes to your diet, which in turn affects the way your body maintains itself. A bad diet doesn’t necessarily mean eating junk food or eating excessively. It can also mean a diet where you are eating inconsistently. Eating inconsistently also affects your metabolism rate, and a bad metabolism rate usually translates to your body having to adapt to random inputs of nutrition. By depriving your body of resources it will not have consistently, your body will adapt by depriving the growth of non-essential cells such as hair.
3. Sleep affects your natural healing
When you are sleeping, your body automatically registers that it can redirect its resources to focus on things like repairing damaged tissues. You are not in need of resources going to moving muscles, and therefore your body can use those resources that aren’t being used to move to grow other parts of your body. These growths range from skin cells that were shed or broken that day to hair growth on parts of your body that received stimulus throughout the day.
One of the most important points of healing that your body goes through at night is the regeneration of skin cells. Since skin cells are constantly being stretched, scraped, and peeled throughout the day by abrasion and movement, it is constantly replaced by your body on a daily basis. When you do not sleep, this replacement process is slowed and your body is forced to work harder to maintain the healthy growth of new skin cells. This leads to weakened skin, including the skin on your head. When the skin of your scalp is weak, you are more prone to hair loss because your follicles aren’t reinforced to continue holding your hair in place. It is also difficult for new hair to grow under unhealthy conditions stemming from overworked dermal cells.
If you are truly sleep deprived, you can eventually see that your skin will feel worn out. When your skin is working overtime without rest, you can develop oily skin as a reaction to your immune system working harder, or dry skin because you aren't getting as much hydration using your water
reserve that is used to rest. Such developments can translate to acne and hair loss
Getting a Restful Night
If you are struggling to get a restful night of sleep and now understand how can sleep affect hair growth, then you might want to improve your nightly routines. Try RKT shampoo and herbal scents before bed. You may experience greater relaxation from the use of refreshing scents over unnaturally sweet ones.
