Sleep is a fundamental part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle but how long a person should Sleep mainly depends on the person. There are those who require the suggested “8 hours a day” while others can function perfectly fine with less sleep. Different types of sleep schedules pertain to different individuals. Unfortunately, sleep is too important, too complex. It is a combination of complicated processes, long established habits and tangled physical properties. If we only concentrate on the short term; i.e. sleeping better tonight, we miss the big picture, which is Better Sleep for Life! Isn’t that what you really want?
Sleep is natural, normal and necessary. It is so elementary a can do it with ease. It is so essential that without it we feel drained. It is a basic function of life, like eating, moving, thinking and creating. Why then at times should it be so darn difficult?!
Although it might seem that your body is inactive while you are sleeping, this is not true. Important changes are going on. They include:
- Sleep Reduces Stress
While you’re sleeping, your brain is functioning, but on a subconscious level. Because your brain is not consciously thinking about anything, your mind takes some time off from all the day-to- day life stresses (in healthy sleepers). Also, the regulating of blood pressure and cholesterol levels during sleep should help improve your anxiety levels during the day.
- Sleeps Helps Control Body Weight
Two of the hormones that are regulated during sleep are the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which play a role in how hungry or full we feel throughout the day. Therefore, some people who are sleep deprived may gain weight, as they constantly feel hungry.
- Sleep Boosts Memory
The importance of sleep to your memory is that it gives your brain time to run through events of the day and file them away for future retrieval. Your brain processes, subconsciously (it’s when its conscious it becomes a problem), all the information gathered from the day. This “filing away” of the day’s events, helps clear the slate for a new beginning the next day, making it easier for information retrieval in the future.
Your heart rate and blood pressure decreases.
Your breathing rate decreases
Your body temperature drops slightly
Growth hormones are released
Cortisol is released (some is also released during the day)
Statistics have proved that many people fail to make the effort to get healthy sleep, believing that sleep is nonessential. Research is beginning to show us that this is not true. We are losing sleep at our own risk.
There is plenty of compelling evidence supporting that argument that sleep is the most important predictor of how long you will live, perhaps more important than whether you smoke, exercise, or have high blood pressure or cholesterol levels.
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