How important is sleep to health?

Early to bed and early to rising, makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise. These are the words to a children’s song to encourage them to sleep earlier for better health and a more productive day the next day. Sleep is important. It is important for rejuvenation of the body through rest. The body can repair itself after a long day, and your mind can settle into the unconscious for a while and get ready to conquer another day.

Stress Manager

There are so many advantages to sleeping well within the recommended hours and getting enough rest. The first one is that it reduces stress. When you get a nap and some well-deserved peace, on waking up you feel clearer and ready to manage your stress in a healthy way. For some people, sleep is the way they deal with stress. They take a timeout and wake up ready to handle the pressure in a good way. Whether it’s a work deadline or an unhealthy relationship. It could even be illness, sleep helps you to relax and go about your day more productively.

Better Health

In the same way, sleep helps deal with stress, it can also manage stress-related side effects. One example is high blood pressure. People with this condition are prone to have raised levels of blood pressure when they are stressed. During such times, it is better to close your eyes and rest to avoid any more health problems ensuing. Taking a break is better when things become overwhelming.

Good mood

Waking up angry and tired is not because you had a bad dream necessarily. It is mostly because you did not get enough sleep. When you wake up tired, you tend to be shorter tempered with people for speaking loudly or even demanding things from you in the office. If you have a high-stress job, or active family life sleep could be the one time and place to have solitude and complete rest. Lack of it results in feelings of frustrations and anger towards those who have no fault and no part to play in the fact that you are sleep-deprived.

Creativity

Sleep improves your creativity. Those dreams are proof of an incredible imagination. Sleep gives the physical body a break and mentally the unconscious can soar off and restructure and reorganize itself for creative work. It explains why after sleep, problems seem less complex and ideas flow freely. Researchers at Harvard and Boston College have found that after sleep emotional components are stronger which compliments the creative process.

Physical fitness

Longer hours of sleep have resulted in improved stamina, not just for your daily activities but also for physical activity. This includes exercise and sporting activities. For athletes, this translates into longer playing time with more stamina and less daytime fatigue. The secret to the repeated cramps or feelings of nausea due to overworking your body could just be sleep. Not another round of medication or supplements, instead just adopt an early to bed, early to rise schedule.

Improved academic performance

For children who did not perform well in school, they have problems paying attention and learning in the classroom. Research has shown that children who suffer from insomnia, sleep apnea and other types of interrupted breathing at night suffer in class. Further information indicates that sacrificing sleep to meet deadlines, as adults often do leads to a clear impairment for learning and ultimately performance. Therefore, if the children and adults could both sleep well through the night, they would do better in their respective areas.

Healthy weight

Often times people forget that sleep plays a role in maintaining a healthy weight. This is because sleep and weight are controlled by the same sectors of the brain, and when we feel sleepy the same hormones drive our appetite. Sleeping early means you spend less time thinking about your cravings and binge eating. In addition, dieters in a recent study said they felt more hungry when they got less sleep.