This is part of a weekly series I’m writing in 2016 to focus on one of my three words for the year: beauty. Each Monday a post will explore some aspect of beauty that I’ve been considering. Read more about my focus words of the year.

There is a simple, but profound beauty to sleep - one that you don’t often notice until you are sleep deprived. This week I didn’t sleep well, which lead to my quest of discovering the beauty benefits of sleep…

It started out Tuesday night when I just had a lot of random things twirling around in my brain. I stayed up to work on a blog post, that got my brain firing on all cylinders and suddenly any normal amount of sleep was nothing but a pipe dream. 6 hours of sleep and that was it. But, one bad night of sleep is no biggie.

And then Wednesday rolled around. My seniors are working on a large Capstone project and for some reason I thought it would be brilliant to make them hand in an 8-page rough draft on a Wednesday with the promise to have them back by class on Friday. Genius, I know. And I suppose that plan would have been doable if I gave the papers a cursory, pathetic little glance, made a couple comments and assigned a grade. But that’s not my style, so I poured 30-45 minutes into editing each and everyone of the 31 papers. Wednesday I gave up the editing at 1am, when my head couldn’t take any more size 12 font. 5 hours of sleep were my prize that night.

But then Thursday happened. I wished my little sister a goodbye and safe trip to Rome with a family dinner and then went home to dive into the final dozen, or so, Senior papers I still had to edit. The hours ticked by and suddenly it was after 2 in the morning. I managed to catch a 3-hour catnap, in which I pretty much collapsed on top of my bed and rolled out of it with the 5am alarm.

Friday was a disaster. My eyes were gritty and painful to keep open. My head pounded and my patience was shot. My skin was pale, the bags under my eyes more pronounced. Sudden little pimples popped up over night while the rest of my face felt dry and itchy. I drank caffeinated coffee for the first time since the end of December. I barely ate because the sight of actual food had my stomach churning. Each of the six classes I taught that day were a lesson in perseverance in the face of adversity. When I made it home that night around 5pm I collapsed and pretty much existed in a catatonic state for the rest of the weekend.

All of this had me thinking of how beautiful sleep is - for oh, so many reasons. Because let’s be honest there are serious beauty benefits to good, regular hours of sleep. I read an article once in which some naturally gorgeous celebrity (whom I forget at the moment, but remember thinking she has authority to comment on this) said her single greatest beauty secret was getting between eight and nine hours of sleep every single night.

The Beauty Benefits of Sleeping:

Better Brain Power - This isn’t hard to see. You sleep, you can function. You lack sleep, and every single pathetic little task seems like a mountain that needs to be scaled. Your brain needs that rejuvenating time to commit things to memory and to gear up for the next day. (

Better Skin - It isn’t just our brains that can’t function on little sleep, our bodies also can’t rejuvenate themselves as quickly if we are cutting off that needed time. I’m sure you’ve all seen that the health of your skin is very often directly related to how much sleep you are consistently getting.

Fresher Face - Not only does sleep give us better, healthier looking skin it can also help to dramatically reduce those pesky dark under-eye circles that we are always trying to mask with makeup. The more sleep we get regularly the less visible those racoon eyes become. I suppose that brings the added benefit too of less time spent applying makeup and less money spent buying products to mask tired.

Smarter Diet Choices - Let’s face it, when we are tired it is often much more difficult to make smart food decisions. A frozen pizza or a drive-thru is much quicker and easier to handle than some all-out meal, which takes pre-thought and preparation. When we sleep we’re better able to make the right food choices.

Increased Energy - Sure, it’s obvious, but when we get the amount of sleep our body craves we are better energized to conquer the day ahead of us. On little sleep, even the simplest tasks take a lot of energy, and things that require us to really kick it into gear, like say a trip to the gym, are usually forgone all together.

More Patience - When we don’t sleep we are less able to control our impulses and that means we often let a comment fly that we would normally keep contained, or that eye role we would hold back gets to spin free. We’re better able to be patient with others - their questions, their mistakes, their little quirks. We’re better able to be patient with ourselves too.

What beauty benefits of sleep do you see?