I had spent much of my life saying that sleep was overrated, and how wrong was I? The truth is that sleep is when your body gets the opportunity to heal itself. After battling the physical, mental and environmental issues all day your body needs this chance to help you rest and restore. I always thought that I would be missing out on something, or if I just took one more hour to finish that project it could actually help me out the next day when really I was only making it harder on myself in the long run. Sleep is just as important as nutrition and exercise, and if you don't give your body enough of it then you are actually reducing the effectiveness of any efforts you may be giving yourself. It would be like running a marathon and then smoking a cigarette right after.
Stage 1 (Transition to sleep) – Stage 1 lasts about five minutes. Eyes move slowly under the eyelids, muscle activity slows down, and you are easily awakened.
Stage 2 (Light sleep) – This is the first stage of true sleep, lasting from 10 to 25 minutes. Eye movement stops, heart rate slows, and body temperature decreases.
Stage 3 (Deep sleep) – You’re difficult to awaken, and if you are awakened, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes.
Stage 4 (More intense deep sleep) – The deepest stage of sleep. Brain waves are extremely slow. Blood flow is directed away from the brain and towards the muscles, restoring physical energy.
REM sleep (Dream sleep) – About 70 to 90 minutes after falling asleep, you enter REM sleep, where dreaming occurs. Eyes move rapidly. Breathing is shallow. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. Arm and leg muscles are paralyzed.
During the night, your sleep follows a predictable pattern, moving back and forth between deep restorative sleep (deep sleep) and more alert stages and dreaming (REM sleep). Together, the stages of REM and non-REM sleep form a complete sleep cycle that repeats until you wake up.
Even if you’ve enjoyed a full night’s sleep, getting out of bed isn’t easy if your alarm goes off when you’re in the middle of the deeper stages of sleep (especially stages 3 and 4). If you want to make mornings less painful, set a wake-up time that’s a multiple of 90 minutes, the length of the average sleep cycle. For example, if you go to bed at 10 p.m., set your alarm for 5:30 (a total of 7 ½ hours of sleep) instead of 6:00 or 6:30. You’ll feel more refreshed at 5:30 than you will with another 30 to 60 minutes of sleep, because you’re getting up when your body and brain are already close to wakefulness.
While it may seem like losing sleep isn’t such a big deal, sleep deprivation has a wide range of negative effects that go way beyond daytime drowsiness.
Myth 1: Getting just 1 hour less sleep per night won’t effect your daytime functioning. You may not be noticeably sleepy during the day. But even slightly less sleep can affect your ability to think properly and respond quickly, and compromise your cardiovascular health, energy balance, and ability to fight infections.
Myth 4: You can make up for lost sleep during the week by sleeping more on the weekends. Although this sleeping pattern will help relieve part of a sleep debt, it will not completely make up for the lack of sleep. Furthermore, sleeping later on the weekends can affect your biological clock so that it is much harder to go to sleep at the right time on Sunday nights and get up early on Monday mornings.
During sleep you enable your body to start producing human growth hormone (HGH). HGH, the protein hormone, promotes the growth, maintenance and repair of muscles and bones by facilitating the use of amino acids (the essential building blocks of protein). Every tissue in the body is renewed faster while you are asleep.
Melatonin is another hormone produced helps you control body rhythms and sleep-wake cycles. Levels of melatonin rise as the body temperature falls, to encourage feelings of sleepiness. The opposite occurs to wake us up.
It is mostly during sleep that the sex hormone testosterone and the fertility hormones, follicle-stimulating hormone and leuteinising hormone, are secreted.
Your immune system can benefit from proper sleep by aiding your body's ability to fight infection and resist more opportunities of infection. Studies have shown that by getting proper amounts of sleep you are also increasing your bodies ability of producing higher levels of white blood cells and certain proteins which can aid your body's defense systems.
Our body also contain cells that aid in reducing cancer with a cancer killer called TNF, turmour necrosis factor. Research has shown that people who stayed up until 3am had one-third fewer cells containing TNF the next day, and that the effectiveness of those remaining was greatly reduced.
We also have a built in clock called the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm regulates all the processes of the body, from digestion to cell renewal. All these body rhythms are triggered by an action of a network of chemical messengers and nerves which are controlled by the circadian clock.
Ensuring regular periods of sleep at night lets the bodyclock regulate hormone production, helps you feel awake when you need to be awake and at rest while you need to sleep.
It is normal for your body temperature to slowly fall during sleep as your body is designed to, low body temperatures increase your likelihood of sleeping deeply, allowing the body a chance to rest and rebuild.
Your skin depends on a deep sleep in order to help it repair from the damaging effects from the day. As proteins are the building blocks for cell growth and repair on the inside, so are they for your skin. While you are sleeping your skin's metabolic rate actually speeds up and allows the body's cells to increase their production while reducing the breakdown of those beneficial proteins, giving added meaning to getting your beauty sleep.
While sleeping your body gains the opportunity to relax giving it the opportunity for tissues to be repaired and restored.
During sleep, the cells and tissues that break down to produce toxic waste then become less active. This gives the chance for broken-down tissue to be rebuilt. Studies have shown that during sleep your body is given the opportunity to detoxify your tissues through your bloodstream aiding in producing better lung, kidney, bowels, liver, and skin functions.
The body requires a regular supply of energy and its key source is glucose. This is constantly burned up to release energy for muscle contraction, nerve impulses and regulating body temperature.
When we sleep, your need for these energy reserves is reduced allowing your body more time to find the balance it needs to restore it's glucose levels.
In summary, your body and your life depend on you to get the sleep you need to function, fight disease, stay healthy mentally and physically. Give your body the sleep you need and you can reclaim your life and your body.