Sleep or die: skipping sleep can dramatically increase your risk of obesity, heart disease, a weakened immune system—even death. How's that for a wake-up call?

Men's Fitness, August, 2004 by Shelley Drozd

Yes, you're a busy guy: Places to go, people to see, pegs to pump. So when there aren't enough hours in the day to fit it all in, you barrow 60-odd minutes from your night. Make that a habit and you may eventually fool yourself into thinking that six hours' sleep cruise through life.

BRRRING! You can't hit snooze on this alarm. Depriving yourself of sleep is self-inflicted corporal punishment. How serious can missing a few ZZZs be? So dangerous that simply staggering around like a Night of the Living Dead extra may be the least of your problems. Sleep restriction wears down your body and beats up your brain, leaving you slow, soft, and sick--even dead--years before your time.

But don't panic (that'll only keep you up tonight). Instead, study the following six eye-opening reasons why you need to spend more time with the Sandman, then apply these tips we've provided to make the sleep you're getting even more restful.

Sleepless Side Effect: HEART DISEASE

Mounting evidence suggests that sleeping too little may increase your risk of coronary heart disease. Average less than five hours of sleep a day, a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine warns, and your chance of suffering a heart attack--or dying from one--nearly doubles compared with guys who put in longer shifts between the sheets.

Sleep It Off: Diffuse that ticker time bomb the way James Bond would--by going undercover. Every extra minute you spend sleeping helps suppress your sympathetic nervous system, the part of the body that creates "fight or flight" hormones during stressful situations. "Hormonal disturbances can raise blood pressure, increase heart rate, and disrupt glucose metabolism--all major contributing factors to cardiovascular disease," explains Harvard Medical School's Sanjay Patel, M.D. "Sleep gives the heart time to relax in a low-stress state." Which explains why prolonging your bed time may just extend your lifeline.

"The people who live the longest--and are the healthiest--tend to sleep between seven and eight hours nightly," adds psychologist James Maas, Ph.D., a sleep expert at Cornell University. To determine the ideal amount of time you need to doze each night, Maas recommends hitting the hay 15 minutes earlier than normal for an entire week. If you still feel sluggish midday, keep adding 15 minutes to your nightly sleep routine every week until you finally feel rested and energized. Convinced you're getting enough sleep? Don't bet on it. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that even the most chronically sleep-deprived men report feeling "only slightly sleepy."

Sleepless Side Effect: WEIGHT GAIN

Those love handles you're sporting aren't solely from that Krispy Kreme habit. Exhaustion is a main ingredient in the recipe for jelly belly. "Sleep deprivation disrupts your metabolism, seriously sabotaging efforts to maintain an ideal weight," says Jana Klauer, M.D., an obesity researcher at NYC's St. Luke's--Roosevelt Hospital. Here's how it works: Fat cells produce a hormone called leptin, which tells the body how much potential energy it has stored. Since leptin production peaks at night, when you're asleep, sleep deprivation can throw levels of the hormone out of whack. The end result? Your body has no idea how much energy it has banked, so you end up storing fat instead of burning it.

Sleep It Off: The best way to trim the fat is to grab your 40 winks. So consider a full night's rest an integral part of any weight-loss regimen. Getting sufficient sleep will prevent lags in energy and help reduce carb cravings, notes Klauer. It'll also help build belly-busting muscle. "Sleep deprivation causes a drop in the production of human growth hormone," says Klauer. (This ensures the fat your body stores will make a beeline for your waistline.) "After a good workout, you get a lot more deep, slow-wave sleep, and it's this cell-repairing stage of sleep where up to 70% of daily growth-hormone secretion takes place in young men." Meaning, even if you're getting in your time at the gym, you still need to hit the sack to complete the biological process that makes muscles pop.

Sleepless Side Effect: POOR SEX DRIVE

Too little sleep may leave you soft in the head (that's right--your favorite head). "Sleep deprivation can increase your risk of erectile dysfunction," says Jon L. Pryor, a professor of urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota. That's because testosterone levels plummet when you don't get enough sleep, making it much tougher to get and sustain an erection. But you may be too tired to care, since low T also triggers a drop in men's desire for sex.

Sleep It Off: There's nothing like a rigorous romp in the sack to put you into a deep doze. Approximately 90 minutes after blissfully passing out, most men arrive in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. That's the dream state in which erections naturally occur--up to live times a night, when you sleep long and well enough. And why should you care about sleep-induced arousals? Use it or lose it, friend. Think of each erection as a sexual chinup: Every time your penis rises, it becomes stronger and less vulnerable to impotence. So strong that you'll sport wood whether you're dreaming of Elisha Cuthbert or Dame Judi Dench.