Sleep affects almost everything about us. Sleep and dreams are related to consciousness, cognition, thinking, desire, memory, and emotions. Physiologically, sleep and dreams are related to the immune system, metabolism, congenital diseases, and endocrine systems. Sleep is the single most effective thing we do every day to reset our brain and body health. Sleep is an extraordinary elixir that can help you live comfortably in old age and live longer.
Our 24/7 society seems to be slowly taking away our sleep, but at what cost?
All the vital health systems in the body and brain are miraculously enhanced during sleep, and are visibly compromised when you don't get enough sleep.
Unfortunately, sleep is not like a bank. Suppose that you are deprived of one night's sleep (8 hours). Then you are back to sleep on the second or even third night, and while you'll get more sleep on those nights, you'll never get back all the sleep you lost. In fact, you may only get back less than 50% of those 8 hours lost.
Therefore, you will be carrying this sleep debt all the time. In other words, you can't accumulate sleep debt over the course of a week and then hope to pay it all off over the weekend. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get back all the sleep you've lost. Week after week, this sleep debt escalates, like interest compounding on unpaid loans.
Therefore, we should think of sleep as the best life and health insurance you can get. Thankfully, sleep is largely pain-free, free as far as medical advice is concerned, and the benefits can be repeated every night if you choose to.
Sleep is the single most effective thing we do every day to reset our brain and body health. Sleep is an extraordinary elixir that can help you live comfortably in old age and live longer. Here's what we know about this panacea of nature.
What happens if you get too little sleep?
Lack of sleep is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, and/or stroke. Even an hour less sleep can be detrimental.
There is a global experiment that involves more than 1.5 billion people in 70 countries twice a year. You know the experiment, it's called Daylight Saving Time (Daylight Saving Time, a state mandated move forward one hour to save energy). According to a 2014 study published in the journal Open Heart that looked at more than 42,000 hospital admissions for heart attacks, in the spring, when we slept an hour less, heart attacks the next day increased by 24%.
Even hormonal changes can occur when you don't get enough sleep. According to a small study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2011, young healthy men who slept only 4 hours a night ended up with testosterone levels comparable to those 10 years older.
In other words, lack of sleep, even just a few nights, can "age" a man for more than a decade in terms of hormonal vitality. The same damage to a woman's reproductive health and hormonal status occurs due to lack of sleep.
There is also a strong relationship between sleep health and immune health. People who slept less than seven hours a night were nearly three times more likely to be infected with the common cold.
If you don't get enough sleep in the week before your annual flu shot, you may develop less than 50 percent of the required antibody response, making the vaccine much less effective.
Lack of sleep significantly increases anxiety and is associated with higher rates of depression. More recently, studies have shown that sleep deprivation significantly increases the chances of suicidal thoughts, suicide planning, and tragic suicide.
In contrast, proper sleep will bring
quite significant health benefits in countless ways, developing our memory and
learning abilities, and improving our immunity, physical fitness, and mental
health.
One benefit of the Covid-19 pandemic that many (though not all) have experienced is greater freedom in their sleep time. When we had to commute and drop our kids to school, we were forced into an early morning routine.
With greater sleep freedom, we're basically seeing the "revenge of the night owls" as they start to sleep on their natural, 24-hour biological rhythm. I just hope this freedom is still there as we start to emerge from this Covid-19 pandemic.
How much sleep do we need?
Based on tens of thousands of scientific studies, most adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep a night. In fact, authoritative health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), now require the average adult to get at least seven hours of sleep.
Based on abundant evidence, this reasoning is sound. For example, consistently getting less than six hours of sleep has been linked to a number of health conditions, including certain cancers, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and being overweight or obese.
Can sleep keep your brain healthy?
Lack of sleep is fast becoming one of the lifestyle factors most likely to influence your risk of Alzheimer's disease. Those with sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, are significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease.
In the Alzheimer's patients we see, there is a sticky, toxic protein that builds up in their brains called beta-amyloid. Along with another toxic protein called tau, it is a key component of the Alzheimer's disease cascade.
We now know that sleep deprivation is a causal factor leading to greater accumulation of beta-amyloid in the brain, establishing a pathway for Alzheimer's disease.
Prioritizing your sleep in youth and middle age may help reduce your risk of Alzheimer's, or at least slow its onset later in life. Even if you've been ignoring sleep until now, it's not too late to start. Clinical studies have shown that successfully treating sleep disturbances in middle-aged and older adults can delay the onset of dementia by 10 years.
Does caffeine really keep me awake?
A key factor in helping you fall asleep and then stay asleep throughout the night involves a chemical called adenosine. Think of adenosine as a sleepy chemical that gradually builds up in the brain throughout the day. The longer you stay awake, the more it builds up and the more sleepy you feel. Most of us experience a strong urge to sleep when adenosine levels peak after 12 to 16 hours of waking hours.
Because you can mute adenosine's healthy sleep signals with coffee. Caffeine, a psychoactive drug, enters your brain and basically blocks the receptors for adenosine. As a result, you lose the sleepy signal, making sleep much less likely to occur, and even if it does, it's easy to wake up halfway through.
The caffeine concentration peaks after
about 30 minutes. The problem is, caffeine persists, and for a long time. In
medicine, the term "half-life" is used when discussing the effects of
a drug. Half-life refers to the time it takes your body to completely clear 50%
of a drug dose.
For most people, the half-life of caffeine is 5 to 6 hours. Therefore, its quarter-life is between 10 and 12 hours. So if you have a cup of coffee at 2pm, 25% of the caffeine is still wandering around in your brain at midnight. Drinking coffee at 2 p.m. is the equivalent of tucking yourself into bed at midnight, but just before that, you gulp down a quarter of a cup of hot coffee in hopes of getting a good night’s sleep. This cannot happen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against caffeine I love coffee. In fact, coffee has been linked to many health benefits, although this may be due to the powerful antioxidants in the beans rather than the caffeine itself. But like many things, when it comes to caffeine, the dose (and timing) determines the toxicity. For most people, limiting caffeine to one to three cups a day and stopping caffeine before noon will help you sleep better.
Can sleep keep you slim?
Have you noticed that when your sleep is so short, you want to eat more? We know why. Lack of sleep suppresses a hormone that signals food gratification, but increases the concentration of the hormone gastrin, which makes you feel hungry. Even though you're full and full, you're still going to want more. It's a proven secret for weight gain in adults and children.
Add all this together, and it becomes increasingly clear that the insomnia epidemic may be a key factor plaguing many obesity epidemics, along with the proliferation of processed foods, greater consumption, and an increase in sedentary behaviours.
Prioritizing sleep is one of the most
powerful ways to regain control of your weight and waistline.
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