Health Matters: Stop Negotiating With Your Sleep, It Is Making You Sick

Last Updated:April 27, 2026, 14:53 IST

News18 spoke with three leading physicians — a psychiatrist, a cardiologist, and a pulmonologist. They all reiterated what we already knew – sleep is medicine, not just rest.

We have built entire cultures around not sleeping. The all-nighter is a badge of honour. But medicine is now saying, loudly and clearly, what many of us have chosen to ignore: chronic sleep deprivation is not a productivity hack. It is a slow-moving health crisis.

India is the second most sleep-deprived nation in the world. Average sleep in Indian cities has dropped to under six hours a night. One in three working adults reports chronic fatigue — and yet we celebrate this.

For this week’s Health Matters, News18 spoke with three of India’s leading physicians — a psychiatrist, a cardiologist, and a pulmonologist. They all reiterated what we already knew – sleep is medicine, not just rest.

The Brain Pays First

Dr Pratima Murthy, former director of NIMHANS, was unequivocal on one point that we rarely hear framed this way: sleep is not passive. It is an active, biological repair process. During sleep, the brain clears out toxic waste products that accumulate through the day. If that clearing doesn’t happen consistently, the result is not just tiredness — it is cognitive deterioration, emotional dysregulation, and disruption to the autonomic nervous system, affecting everything from thought processes to blood pressure to organ function.

Her second point was practical. She cautioned that many Indians — particularly those in large joint families, or those with demanding schedules — are not protecting their sleep the way they protect other health habits. Her advice: identify whether you are an owl or a lark, build a fixed sleep-wake routine around that, and treat sleep hygiene seriously. That means a light meal at night, no stimulants, a quiet and dark environment, and phones kept away. “Sleep is such a gentle thing," she said, “but such a powerful part of our lives."

The Heart Keeps Score

Dr Puroshottam Lal, one of India’s known interventional cardiologists and chairman of Metro Hospitals explained the cardiac cost in terms that are hard to brush aside. Sleep deprivation causes the inner arterial wall to stiffen, reducing its ability to relax and contract the way a healthy artery must. It triggers a surge in cortisol and adrenaline, raises blood pressure, drives insulin resistance, and pushes cholesterol in the wrong direction. None of these in isolation would be alarming. Together, they constitute a significant and independent risk factor for coronary artery disease.

His second concern was specific to younger patients. Dr Lal noted that the combination of professional pressure, late-night screen habits, and disrupted routines means that young people today are compromising both the quantity and the quality of their sleep — and paying for it with their hearts earlier than any previous generation. “Almost every heart patient’s medical history," he observed, “talks about a problematic sleeping schedule."

A Pulmonologist’s Warning

Dr Randeep Guleria, former director of AIIMS Delhi, brought a perspective that is both population-level and deeply clinical. He pointed out that as a species, humans have gone from sleeping eight to nine hours a generation ago to barely five to six hours on average today — and that this shift is showing up directly in the epidemic of non-communicable diseases: diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and early-onset coronary artery disease. Sleep deprivation, he said, does not travel alone. It combines with obesity, with sleep apnoea, and with metabolic disruption to drive a compounding health burden — particularly in the young.

His second point was a quiet indictment of public health priorities. Guleria noted that sleep has never quite made it to the same level of conversation as diet or exercise, even though the evidence demands it. People come into clinics with complaints that seem unrelated — fatigue, stress, metabolic issues — and when you go to the root, the problem is often sleep. “People even boast," he said, “that they sleep only four hours and get along very well. It starts affecting their health in the long run. That is something they need to realise."

The Bottom Line

Three different specialties, three different bodies of evidence — and one shared conclusion. Sleep is not downtime. It is maintenance. The brain clears its waste, the heart resets its pressure, and the body recalibrates its hormones — all during sleep, all for free, every single night.

The good news is that sleep debt, unlike many of the conditions it causes, is still reversible. But that requires us to stop treating rest as something we will get around to once everything else is done. Everything else will wait. Your body won’t.

News india Health Matters: Stop Negotiating With Your Sleep, It Is Making You Sick

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