Benefits Of Sleep And How It Affects Your Health
By Doaa Samir
Sleep plays a very important role in your life because it allows your body and mind to heal, which helps you to feel refreshed and alert when you awake. A good night’s sleep is also beneficial to the body’s overall health and its ability to prevent disease.
If you don’t get enough sleep your brain won’t be able to function properly. This makes it difficult to concentrate, think clearly or recall specific details. Getting enough sleep is important for a person’s health and well-being, and to operate at an optimum level. Sleep is just as important to your health as physical exercise and a well-balanced diet.
Benefits Of Sleep
1. Sleepers Consume Less Calories Than Non-Sleepers
Sleep-deprived individuals typically have a larger appetites and consume more calories according to studies. Sleep deprivation is thought to create poor appetite regulation by disrupting daily fluctuations in appetite hormones. Lack of sleep creates higher levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases your appetite, and lower levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite. This combination will have direct effects on your waistline.
2. Sleep Will Help You Focus and Be More Productive
Sleep is essential for a number of brain functions, such as cognition and attention. Operating on in a sleep deficit has a detrimental effect on both of these. Both children and adults have been shown to benefit from adequate sleep in terms of problem-solving abilities and memory capacity.
3. Sleep Will Help Athletes Perform Better
It has been shown that having enough sleep enhances athletic performance. Having a longer snooze was shown to enhance tempo, accuracy, reaction times, and mental well-being in a study of basketball players. Fewer hours of sleep in older women has been linked to lower exercise efficiency and fitness limitations.
4. Sleep Boosts the Immune System
Immune function has been shown to be affected by even a slight sleep deprivation. A broad two-week study documented the progression of the common cold after participants were given cold virus nasal drops. They discovered that those who slept less than 7 hours were almost three times more likely to catch a cold than anyone in the study that slept 8 hours or more.
Relationship Between Sleep and Health
We feel healthier, more alert, energetic and better able to focus and perform our daily tasks when we sleep well. One of the most important things you can do for your health and safety, as well as to reduce your risk of illness, is to get enough sleep each night.
Sleep is a well-known biological role that is necessary for survival. Many important functions occur when we sleep, including physical rehabilitation and repair, brain growth, proper heart function, metabolism, memory improvement and mood enhancement. Sleep is particularly critical for children’s growth and overall health. Both babies and toddlers require significantly more sleep than adults.
Inadequate or irregular sleep on a regular basis leads to long-term health issues such as:
Obesity.
Cardiovascular disease.
Type 2 diabetes.
Poor mental health.
So do yourself a favor and get the rest your body requires. By not getting enough sleep, you are doing more harm than good in more ways than one.