You might remember your doctor after having yourself checked that you should sleep early. Well, you probably should listen since sleeping and health has a strong connection with each other. Most of the time, many people tend to view sleep as a luxury and not a necessity that they don’t think that the benefits of limiting the hours they spend asleep outweigh the costs.
Many studies have already shown and talked about the interlinking connection of the quality of your sleep with your overall health. However, it would be a long list of the researchers’ study of how sleep affects an individual’s health— so here is a concise and a short list of how the quality of an individual’s sleep is equivalent to one’s quality of life. So let’s have a cup of coffee in the morning and take a while to consider these facts.
Better Overall Health
One of the risks, when you are sleep deprived, is the state of your mind and body. Sleeping is considered the repair time of an individual’s body, thus depriving your body of ample time of sleep is the same as denying your body to repair itself. Sleeping will not grant you immortality— however, it will lessen your vulnerability from some serious health problems.
Commonly in most cases, the health risks from sleep loss only become serious after years. A recent study has simulated the effects of a continuous sleep deprivation of shift workers on 10 young healthy adults that after a mere of four days, three of them had blood glucose levels that qualify as pre-diabetic —which may be due to insulin resistance due to sleep loss.
Strong Immunity
Studies have shown that sleep loss is the same as exposing yourself to viruses such as a cough and colds. One study has put this to a test wherein researchers tracked over 150 people and monitored their sleep habits for a week which then they exposed to a cold virus. The study revealed that those who slept less were almost three times as likely to get sick.
This is due to a small protein in our immune system—the cytokines— which your immune system releases during sleep. Wherein, the production decreases the protective cytokines and some antibodies due to a continuous sleep loss. In addition as to how sleep affects the immune system, not getting enough sleep affects your body’s recovery from sickness.
Healthy Balanced Emotions
You might have experienced it beforehand, waking up cranky while feeling that heavy feeling on your shoulders and how the surroundings seem just so irritating to look at. This is because of the emotional center inside your brain—the amygdala, which the prefrontal cortex keeps in check so you can process feelings and produce balanced responses.
However, when you are sleep deprived, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex’s connection gets interrupted when you do not get enough sleep. As of now, you might probably have pictured in your head all the mood swings and the irritability that you had when you had a continuous phase of not getting enough sleep—so here is the culprit.
Less Stress
If you have heard the butterfly effect then you probably know how one affects another. Sleep and stress come hand in hand and is a vicious cycle for an individual to be put into. When you are not getting enough sleep, the body uses a chain of chemicals to send a message of stress which then would result in the release of adrenaline and other stress hormones.
By having an ample time of sleep, this type of chain reaction within an individual’s body is blocked. This is due to the brain chemical during the deep sleep stage that tells the pituitary gland to slow down the production of the stress hormone. Which is, as a result, the adrenal gland never gets the signal to pump out stress hormones, and the body gets a chance to truly rest.
Better Relationships
Because sleep deprivation affects the emotional center of our brain and the prefrontal cortex that controls how an individual emotionally reacts, it is not a big surprise if you are having a hard time in socializing and being a happy individual towards your partner, friends, and those whoever surrounds you.
Depriving yourself of sleep directly affects how you see and treat those that surround you. This just proves that not getting enough sleep does not only affect the emotional well-being but it also undermines the relationship between those that surround us.
Take Away
If you look at it closely, by only not getting enough sleep creates a domino effect in our mind and body’s well-being. Although the researchers are still trying to untie the mysteries of sleep and its ways, it cannot be denied that sleep has a great impact on an individual’s overall health. Sleeping healthy is the only way to avoid this kind of circumstances, so for more information, visit counting sheep research for additional knowledge about sleep.