Sleep is more than rest, it’s how your body stays in rhythm. In this NightOwling lesson, circadian health expert and medical scientist Logan Pendergrast, Ph.D., explains how quality sleep acts as the body’s master regulator, syncing your brain, hormones, and organs to keep everything working together.
Dr. Pendergrast shares how even a single night of poor sleep can raise stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and disrupt the expression of hundreds of genes. The result? Your body’s balance, focus, and recovery all take a hit.
Learn why protecting sleep is the key to keeping your body coordinated, resilient, and performing at its best.
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So sleep can be thought of as our body's
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main nervous system reboot. During
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quality rest, we see that the brain
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synchronizes our hormones. It
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synchronizes our immune signals and it
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helps us function metabolically. And it
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also synchronizes the communication
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between our organs. And when sleep is
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cut short, what we see is that there is
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a desynchrony between our organ systems
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that leads to increases in adrenaline
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and cortisol, which are hormones that
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are associated with stress and feeling
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stressed. And this can lead to a
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downstream uh effect on other bodily
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systems. And one example of this that's
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shown in the scientific literature is
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that one night of poor sleep affects the
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expression of up to 700 different genes
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in the body. Meaning that at the
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cellular level, our bodies are affected
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by a poor night of"
