How far reaching are the effects of sleep deprivation?

Source: yahoo.com/health

Sleep.  It’s something everyone needs but few of us seem to get enough of.  According to Your Body After a Night of Not-Enough Sleep by Rachel Grumman Bender, “Sleep deprivation is so common and pervasive these days that it’s now considered a public health epidemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”  This probably isn’t too shocking to the average reader.  With the pressures of work and school sleep has never been harder to have time for.  It is well known that lack of sleep can have negative affects on our life, but I believe that lack of sleep can also negatively affect a person's’ consumer behaviors.

According to Rachel Grumman Bender, “When you don’t get enough, the mental effects are immediate. They range from having a harder time concentrating and making decisions to having headaches and struggling to remember things,”  It is easy to realize based on this that a person who isn’t sleep as much as he should would be in a abnormal mind state when they’re shopping. At the time being I still need to learn how this altered mindset would actually affect the consumer in his decision making.  However it is safe to say this can’t be good for the consumer.  Maybe he struggles to remember that he has a coupon for a cheaper price.  Without being able to concentrate, he may not be able to compare two goods to each other to decide which is the best for him.

She goes on to mention that “‘Your ability to regulate and control your emotions, as well as [cope] with change, are affected,’ she says. That’s a nice way of saying that you’re more likely to be grouchy and irritable when you’re short on sleep. Research shows that getting less than five hours of sleep at night can make you feel more stressed, sad, and angry.”  It could be that the consumer because he is less able to cope with change, that he continues to buy the same products without fair assessment of competitor products.  This would put the creators of his typical product unnaturally demanded thus hurts competition.  All together, I have yet to find exact research as to how sleep deprived people compare to their sleeping counterparts as consumers.  

Future Question: How do sleep deprived people act as consumers?