I mean, imagine how much more you could do in a day with two extra hours.

But what would actually happen if you cut out two hours of your sleep every night?

First, we need to understand how much sleep your body and brain actually need.

The vast majority of research on the topic has concluded that around eight hours of sleep is optimal for the average person, but today almost 50% of people get six hours or less each night.

Now, the first night of less sleep may actually trigger the meso limbic system, releasing dopamine and giving you a sense of adrenaline.

But your brains slowly begins to shut off the areas associated with planning and making decisions.

And even though you may still feel fine getting six hours, the truth is actually much darker and worrisome than you might realize.

Scientists use a technique known as psycho motor vigilance tasks or P V tees, to understand the impact of sleep deprivation on humans and studies.

Simply put, it's a reaction test.

A red button randomly turns green and people have to push it as fast as possible.

Not so surprisingly, those who get eight hours of sleep over a two week period show very few lapses in attention and no cognitive declines.

But those groups that receive either six or four hours of sleep see declining PVT results on almost a daily basis for the entire two week period.

Of course, the four hour group performs the worst, but these results don't just show a loss of concentration.

They show full lapses and awareness called micro sleeps.

In other words, their brains aren't just slower but shutting off for moments at a time.

When looking at the results deeper, scientists concluded that getting six hours of sleep for 10 days in a row was the same as not sleeping for 24 hours straight.

That's the same cognitive decline as being legally drunk.

And if you get four hours of sleep for 11 days, it's like you haven't slept for 48 hours straight.

The studies also show that participants were not at all aware of their cognitive declines.

In other words, when you're tired, it's like being that drunk person at a party who insists that they can drive home fine.

Other tests show that your ability to memorize and retain information, or even do simple math or problem solving, decline and similar rates.

But perhaps the scariest fact is that even after one night of four or five hours of sleep, your natural killer cells, which stop cancer cells from proliferating in your body, dropped by 70%.

You're also more likely to catch a cold because your immune system is weakened, which is why, when we're sick, we feel compelled to sleep so much.

Chronic lack of sleep is also linked to bowel, prostate and breast cancer, and people over 45 who sleep under six hours a night are also 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.

Even the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen.

So even though you may swear that cutting two hours of sleep makes you so much more productive in that you don't feel any worse, just remember that every single day your cognitive abilities continue to decrease, costing you much more than you may have bargained for.

Be sure to check out our latest video, where we challenged ourselves to wear every single piece of plastic used or seven days while living our normal life in public, which was insanely embarrassing.

We really want to make more content that can affect people's lives on the planet, and this one has a tonic, cool science in it but wasn't seen by that many people.

So we really appreciate you checking it out.

And if you want to learn more about sleep and pushing herself, our latest podcast is about hustle culture and touches on a variety of studies related to stress, sleep and how much you should be working to optimize your results.

We'll leave links in the description.

Otherwise, be sure to subscribe for more, and we'll see you next time for another video.