We all know good sleep makes the difference between having a good day and coping with everything that happens or collapsing under the demands of a day’s events. And being sleep deprived increases pain intensity. Good sleep serves many purposes that contribute to physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, both short term and long term. In fact, good sleep is essential.
Sleep and Problem Solving
It’s no accident that a good night’s sleep often provides solutions to problems. While worrying or fretting about an issue the answers just don’t seem to come. Once you finally give up stressing and trying to resolve it and go to sleep, your subconscious has an unimpeded opportunity to put together the solutions, and you wake with the answer. That is a common experience.
Sleep and Brain and Body Maintenance
A good night’s sleep allows your body to repair the wear and tear of the day and to rebuild energy reserves. And it is also the time your brain sorts the day’s activities and files the experiences into your longer-term memory banks for later retrieval. Our dreams appear to be part of that process and are essential to mental and emotional wellbeing.
Sleep and Brain Function
Sleep deprivation results in fatigue, contributes to human error related accidents, misjudgments, poor focus, memory lapses, personality changes, thought disorders, depression and other mental disorders.
Scientific studies show that sleep is as important to health and wellbeing as diet and exercise. If you’ve had a good night’s sleep you handle all kinds of stress far more effectively in your daily waking hours.
So how much does poor sleep contribute to poor health and degenerative diseases?
Sleep and Diabetes
Eve Van Cauter, PhD, reported at the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting, that people who regularly do not get enough sleep can become less sensitive to insulin. This increases their risk for diabetes and high blood pressure, both serious threats to the brain and to health in general.
Sleep and Age Related Ailments
Previous work by Dr Van Cauter, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, found that, “Metabolic and endocrine changes resulting from a significant sleep debt mimic many of the hallmarks of aging. We suspect that chronic sleep loss may not only hasten the onset but could also increase the severity of age-related ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and memory loss.”
Sleep and Cortisol
Researchers have found impaired sleep results in increased cortisol levels, and decreased levels in growth hormone. This drop in growth hormone is associated with an increase of fatty tissue, weakened immunity, and a decline in general health. As people age the quality and quantity of their sleep is diminished, so the cortisol levels rise compromising their immune system. This may be the cause of many diseases associated with aging, including impaired memory.
Sleep and Middle Age
“The increased prevalence of insomnia in middle-age may, in fact, be the result of deteriorating sleep mechanisms associated with increased sensitivity to arousal-producing stress hormones such as corticotropin-releasing hormone and cortisol,” Dr Alexandros Vgontzas and colleagues suggest. It seems it’s not just that middle-aged people worry more, but a disorder of sustained hyper-arousal of the body’s stress response system. What that means is that in middle age when you are all stirred up it just takes longer to settle down.
Sleep and Cancer
Dr David Spiegel of Stanford University has been conducting studies into how sleep and cancer can be related. He concludes that sleep problems actually alter the balance of at least two hormones, cortisol and melatonin, that influence cancer cells.
Cortisol is an adrenal hormone with two jobs. It is part of the stress response and kicks in dramatically when your “alarm bells” go off and you need to be extra alert. And cortisol is also a normal part of day and night rhythms of you body. Cortisol governs your level of wakefulness, reaching its peak early morning to get you up and moving for the day. It declines as the day goes along, being lowest in the evening so you can rest, relax and sleep.
Cortisol is vital to the regulation of the immune system, including the release of “killer cells” that destroy cancer cells.
Melatonin, produced by the brain when you sleep, is one of the strongest antioxidants that helps prevent damage to cells that can lead to cancer. Lack of restful sleep goes with too little melatonin and higher estrogen, which is linked with breast cancer in particular.
“The bottom line of this report is that there is enough information to take seriously the idea that how our bodies respond to cancer is influenced by more than just the surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. It can be influenced by stress and sleep, and these are two pieces in the puzzle that shouldn’t be overlooked,” says Len Lichtenfeld, MD, of the American Cancer Society. We are getting closer to mainstream medicine becoming more holistic in its view of illness and disease.
Sleep and Children’s Behaviour
A Northwestern University study of 500 preschoolers found that those who slept less than 10 hours in a 24 hour period, including daytime naps, were 25% more likely to misbehave. They were more likely to be aggressive, oppositional or uncooperative.
The research shows that sleep disturbances in children are also associated with health disturbances, like allergies, ear infections and hearing problems, and also with social adaption.
Bottom Line is – Good Sleep Is Essential
So no matter what your age, through out your life, good restful and recuperative sleep is important to physical, mental, emotional and social wellbeing. Kinesiology balancing can help to make good sleep possible.
Cheers
Anna