Besides losing you mental abilities you also start to lose your physical abilities. Sleeping brings rest to every cell of your body. During the night (a well slept night) your hormone levels vary from producing a lot of human growth hormone and melatonin to producing corticosteroids in the early morning. Although cortisol is being produced even if you don’t sleep. There is also a change in the patterns in which sex hormones are produced. All these components have a strong effect on how your muscles recover from last days work. How your joints heal and reduce the slight inflammation that is caused from all the walking and lifting. This builds up and after a few nights you start aching all around. Painfulness increases as the time you stay awake constantly increases. This makes it even harder to fall asleep.

If you have trouble sleeping for a long period of time – Not that you don’t get any sleep, but that you are not getting enough sleep – your immune functions start to diminish. First things that you will most likely notice is that you are cold all the time. Your body metabolism is slowing down and your body temperature might drop even one or two degrees! You will usually have a runny nose and start sneezing. This can be helped with a good night of sleep, but as it is not possible for someone suffering from insomnia, it will cause a long cycle of illnesses. Usually they are just minor diseases like the flu, but they can get very severe since normal immune functions are nearly non-existant. This is one of the reasons why sleeping problems should be taken care of at an early stage.