Benefits of Sleep
There are many benefits to getting a good night sleep ranging from learning, memory, and mood. Your heart and hormones also require adequate rest to perform at their best. Not getting enough sleep can be dangerous, it can slow down your reflexes, lead to risky behavior, and slow down your reaction time.
Sleeping Improves Memory and Learning
It isn’t really known why sleeping improves memory and learning but recent studies have shown that people who get a good 8 hours of sleep tend to learn a task better than those who did not get enough rest. Experts believe that while people sleep they form and/or reinforce pathways in the brain needed to perform these tasks. Not only is a good night’s sleep required to form new learning and memory pathways in the brain, but sleep is also necessary for those pathways to work up to speed. Meaning that sleep is required to keep your thinking processes from slowing down. Going without sleep may make it harder to pay attention and focus as well as make a person more easily confused.
Sleeping Improves Your Mood
Getting a good night sleep has also been linked to a person’s mood. Many individuals report being irritable when they don’t get enough sleep. For those that chronically suffer from a lack of sleep are at a greater risk of developing depression.
Sleeping Helps Your Heart
During REM sleep, your heart rate and blood pressure have boosted spikes of activity, however while you are sleeping your heart rate and blood pressure is reduced by about 10 percent. Sleep enables your heart and vascular system the rest it needs.
Without a good nights sleep and this dip in blood pressure people are more likely to experience strokes, chest pain, an irregular heartbeat, and heart attacks. The likelihood of developing congestive heart failure also increases.
Failure to experience the normal dip in blood pressure during sleep can be related to insufficient sleep time, an untreated sleep disorder, or other factors.
The body is put under stress when there is a lack of sleep and this may trigger the release of more cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress hormones during the day. Contributing to the prevention of your blood pressure not dipping during sleep, thereby increasing the risk of heart disease. Insufficient sleep may also adversely affect your heart and vascular system by the increased production of certain proteins thought to play a role in heart disease.
Sleeps Helps You Fight Infections
While sleeping your body creates cellular hormones, cytokines, which helps your body fight off infections. The lack of sleep can reduce the ability to fight off common infections adversely affecting your overall health.
Sleep Helps with Weight Control
There is more to controlling and maintaining a healthy weight that exercise and diet. Sleeping plays a role in regulating appetite, energy use, and weight control. While sleeping the body increases its production of leptin, appetite suppressor, and decreases the production of grehlin, appetite stimulant. Studies have shown that people who don’t get enough sleep at night tend to be overweight and prefer eating foods that are higher in calories.
Next - How Much Sleep is Enough
References: US Department of Health and Human Services
