9 Reasons For a Good Night Sleep

Ashfaq · #1 (**permalink**) 11-01-2007, 12:35 PM

"You snooze, you lose". Is that so? All vertebrates sleep, from fish to mammals, and birds even take naps while flying! Even some invertebrates, like insects, sleep. An animal deprived of sleep dies sooner than if it lacks food, because sleep is an imperative metabolic need.

The stress induced by the urban life impairs severely our sleep time. And many jobs, like those of doctors, policemen, firemen, truck drivers, workers in turns, mothers with small babies and others deprive the body of the necessary sleep.

1. Our body regains its strength after a good night sleep, because the metabolism has two phases: burning (catabolism) and building (anabolism).

During the wakefulness, the body's cells burn fuel to release the energy needed for the body to carry on with all its functions, especially the mobile ones, necessary to get food and to procreate. But a predominant burning can be tolerated by the body for several hours.

While sleeping, the body enters in an anabolic phase, when heart band breathing rhythm decrease, muscles relax. The organism now develops, grows, heals and builds; Sleep is controlled by the brain, but what triggers it is not clearly known: from hormones to enzymes.

Still, sleep is a complicated process during which muscles contract and relax; the pulse and pressure increase and decrease, and the brain produces in large amounts its movies.

2. Sleep increases memory and learning ability.

Most of the night, the brain idles in a low energy state named slow-wave sleep; freed from the charge of consciousness, it can cleanup the daily information. Each night, about a quarter of the sleep time is reserved to REM sleep, during which the brain is anything but idle.

REM (rapid eye movement) is connected to vivid dreams and consolidating memories. REM sleep must have other roles, too, as even antidepressants that suppress it won’t impair memory.

Thus, during the sleep, our brain passes short term memory (RAM) into long term brain and muscle memory (Disk). This explains why students who sleep perform better than those that "cram" prior to a test, and sportsmen and musicians need to sleep before competitions or concerts.

Sleep deprivation can severely decrease learning ability. People deprived of sleep store 10% less information than well-rested subjects.

Researches made in rats showed that sleep deprivation can rise levels of stress hormone in the brain, disturbing the nerve activity in the hippocampus, causing memory impairment in sleep-deprived humans.

3. During sleep, the immune system's activity is boosted. That's why when we’re ill, we wake up ...feeling healthy again.

4. The lack of sleep causes energy loss and irascibility.

Two days of sleep loss makes focusing for longer time difficult. In routine jobs, this is the moment when many accidents happen. If you have lost more than three days of sleep, you'll find it very hard to think, see and hear clearly, and you can experience hallucinations.

Following four days of sleep, a subject could execute just a few routine tasks. Activities requiring attention or a minim of sagacity became impossible. Sleep loss is the cause of 100,000 traffic accidents annually. Insomnia can cause marriage and family issues, as the subject becomes irritable.

5. Healthy sleep means longer life!

Less sleep or too much sleep doubles your chances of dying from cardiovascular disease, as found by recent researches. A sleep decrease from 7 to 5 hours or less resulted in a 1.7 times higher risk in mortality from various causes and 2 times from a cardiovascular issue. Those who had an increase in sleep time to at least 8 hours a night were over 2 times more likely to die, but not from cardiovascular diseases.

6. Sleep keeps you in shape!

A new study reveals that children who don't sleep enough are more prone to become obese when adults, as the body is impeded from synthesizing enough amounts of a hormone that inhibits the appetite, leptin. This meant also higher levels of the appetite stimulant ghrelin. Less sleep could also change the body's reactivity to insulin, which determines the rhythm at which the body puts on fat.

Many researchers showed that adults of both genders who sleep up to five hours a night are heavier than those who sleep seven hours or more.

7. Good sleep means good sex.

Women accusing lower sex drive during menopause are more likely to experience disturbed sleep, depression symptoms and night sweats (hot flashes during sleep). Poor sleep reduces energy for everything, including sex.

8. Sleep keeps you mentally healthy.

Sleep loss can induce psychological impairments. The subjects with sleep loss experience a pendulum of emotions, going from upset and annoyed to giddy in moments. The amigdala's activity is profoundly disturbed. Sleep seems to prepare our emotional brain for the next-day social and emotional interactions.

After four and a half days of sleep loss, a person display symptoms of delirium and the perceived world becomes grotesque.

9. Your muscles grow while you're sleeping. That's why if you want big muscles, you have to sleep well. It's pointless to spend hours at the gym and after that party all night in the club. Any body-builder can tell you that.