Love it, hate it, like it or dislike it, Sleep is necessary for every one. A healthy sleep can not only increase the charm in your looks but can also save you from many diseases and physical weakness. It is closely related to your bodily functions and lack of it can seriously impair your thinking abilities. Irrespective of your age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, a good night sleep is must for every living person.
Here are 10 good reasons for you to have a good healthy sleep.
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10. Development and growth
Whether you’re a child or a fully grown adult, your sleep plays a very important role in your development and growth. During infancy and childhood, it’s the prime time for your bones and muscles to grow and repair themselves. Also, it is during night while sleeping that your skin takes in the required oxygen for the body. This is why face glows after a good night sleep, especially visible in women.
9. Death
If you will underestimate the effects that sleep has on you and ignore it like an unwanted girlfriend/boyfriend, you will probably end up in the grave. Studies have shown that long time sleep deprivation can increase the threat to terminal diseases like cancer. Lack of proper sleep can also disturb your mental health to a great extent and make you hallucinate for starters. Remember the movie Machinist? Yeah, sleep deprivation can make you malnourished like that and eventually kill you.
8. Sleep debt
Have you ever experienced sleeping for long long hours after exams are over? That’s probably because of sleep debt. Research has shown that constant intervals of no or less sleep are bound to affect your cognitive and physical performance. Everyone needs their own sweet sleep time EVERYDAY. Avoid getting in the loop of sleep debt; it can cause some major health problems.
7. Metabolism
Bad sleep schedule not only deeply affects your physical performance but also your physical appearance. Chronic sleep deprivation may cause weight gain by affecting our metabolism i.e. the way our bodies process and store carbohydrates, and by altering levels of hormones that affect our appetite. The basic functions involved in metabolism of building up and breaking down of molecules are affected, hence making our digestive system work poorly.
6. Learning and memory
The quantity and quality of sleep have a profound impact on learning and memory. Research suggests that sleep helps learning and memory in two distinct ways. First, a sleep-deprived person cannot focus attention optimally and therefore cannot learn efficiently. Second, sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is essential for learning new information. So if you’re taking too much stress about studies and missing out on your sleep, it is not going to help you in any way. Go, get a good sleep, buddy!
5. Mood
Your sleep can seriously alter your moods, so much that it can even lead to depression. Inadequate amounts of sleep may result in irritability, impatience, inability to concentrate, and moodiness. Too little sleep can also leave you too tired to do the things you like to do. On the other hand, proper sleep can make you feel refreshed and more active. Decision making ability, too, is affected.
4. Efficiency
Be it cognitive tasks like decision making or physical tasks, your efficiency in day-to-day activities depends on how well you’re sleeping. People who are sleep deficient are less productive at work and school. They take longer to finish tasks, have a slower reaction time, and make more mistakes. Your efficiency is affected so much that studies have shown that sleep deficiency harms your driving ability as much as, or more than, being drunk.
3. Cardiovascular Health
Hypertension, increased stress hormone levels, and irregular heartbeat – all can be caused because of sleep disorders. These in turn lead to poor cognitive and physical performance and other health issues. Microsleep can be an outcome too.
2. Immunity
Your immune system relies on sleep to stay healthy.Ongoing sleep deficiency can change the way in which your immune system responds. When a person does not get enough rest, the immune system answers with an inflammatory response. This rise in inflammation can be harmful, especially when it is chronic. Not only that, if you’re sleep deficient, you may have trouble fighting common infections like cold.
1. Unlearning
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of sleep when the most vivid dreams are dreamt, is important for the unlearning of superfluous memories. For instance, when a child learns how to ride a bike and falls off the first ten times, finally successful on the eleventh try, the memory of how to perform the task so as to stay on the bike is the one which is important to retain, not the ones of how to fall off. Unlearning removes the unhelpful memories that may disrupt our thinking process and eventually our activities.