Sleep On It

Submitted by Satoya Foster

Excerpts from http://www.health.am/encyclopedia

 

Do you ever find that you have a hard time concentrating or focusing? Well, lack of sleep may be the cause. Sleep is required for our bodies to form new memory and learning pathways to the brain. It also keeps those pathways working up to speed. Studies show that lack of sleep causes the thinking process to slow down as well as inhibiting concentration and focus. So tired minds and tired bodies are more prone to faulty decision making and slow response times than those that are well rested. Not to mention, lack of sleep can also cause irritability.

Sleep also affects your heart and vascular system. During non-REM sleep, your blood pressure and heart rate slow down significantly as you enter into a deeper state of sleep. During REM sleep, your blood pressure and heart rate have boosted spikes of activity. However, sleep reduced your blood pressure and heart rate about 10 percent. If you don’t get enough sleep, this nightly dip in blood pressure, which appears to be important for good cardiovascular health, may not occur. According to several studies, if your blood pressure does not dip during sleep, you are more likely to experience strokes, chest pain known as angina, an irregular heartbeat, and heart attacks. You are also more likely to develop congestive heart failure, a condition in which fluid builds up in the body because the heart is not pumping sufficiently. 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.

 

 

Lack of sleep can also be contributed to obesity. If we spent more time allowing our bodies to sleep and recharge, then the temptation to eat late would diminish because our bodies would be well rested. So how much sleep do our bodies need? When healthy adults are given unlimited opportunity to sleep, they sleep on average between 8 and 8.5 hours a night. But sleep needs vary from person to person. Some people appear to need only about 7 hours to avoid problem sleepiness whereas others may need 9 or more hours of sleep. Sleep is not just a gift we give ourselves for working long and hard hours; sleep is a fundamental part of caring for our bodies. In order to be truly healthy, we need to sleep. Goodnight.