Only few nights of bad sleep upsets your brain.

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Meeshika Sharma
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Researchers suggest that cutting back on sleep, deliberately or otherwise, can have a serious impact on our bodies.

A few nights of bad sleep can really mess with our blood sugar control and encourage us to overeat. It even messes with our DNA.

A few years ago, Trust Me I'm a Doctor did an experiment with Surrey University, asking volunteers to cut down on their sleep by an hour a night for a week.

Dr Simon Archer, who helped run the experiment, found that getting an hour's less sleep a night affected the activity of a wide range of our volunteers' genes (around 500 in all) including some which are associated with inflammation and diabetes.

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Negative effects on our bodies of sleep deprivation are clear. But what effect does lack of sleep have on our mental health?

To get the answer, Trust Me teamed up with sleep scientists at the University of Oxford to run a small experiment.

They found  increases in anxiety, depression and stress, also increases in paranoia and feelings of mistrust about other people.

These were the results of  only 3 nights of sleep deprivation.

Daniel Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, who led study on negative thoughts thinks one of the reasons why sleep deprivation is so bad for our brains is because it encourages repetitive negative thinking.

"We have more negative thoughts when we're sleep-deprived and we get stuck in them," he said.

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