A number of amazing things happen at night while you slumber peacefully. Getting a solid 7-9 hours of quality sleep every night can have profound benefits for your health. We all know that we feel better, more vibrant, more focused, and more centered when we sleep well, but what happens behind the scenes?
1 – Sleep Repairs Your Body
Your body does all of its repair work at night, secreting special reparative proteins, and boosting the immune system. This can improve recovery from athletic training and workouts, remove metabolic wastes, repair sunburns, and fight infections. During the day, our bodies are too busy taking care of our daily “To Do” lists, but at night (when we finally power down) our internal housekeeping crew powers up.
2 – Sleep Protects Your Heart
Good sleep has been shown to lower blood pressure and even cholesterol in some people. This has a lot to do with promoting relaxation and decreasing stress levels. Getting a good night’s sleep has also been shown to decrease levels of “inflammatory markers” that have been linked to heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events.
3 – Sleep Helps Your Memory
All throughout the day our minds are taking in information, memories, experiences, and the daily minutiae of our lives. At night, our brains organize and “file” that information away in useful, and more importantly, retrievable places. Without that time to file, our thoughts can become scattered, we start to feel very “foggy”, and begin to forget names, faces, events, conversations, etc.
4 – Sleep Helps Control Your Weight!!
A good night’s rest helps regulate the hormones involved in appetite control, and without that regulation our appetites go way up. And, as Murphy’s Law would have it, our carvings aren’t for fruits, vegetables and other nutritious foods. Instead, our cravings are for high calorie, high sugar, high fat, and high carbohydrate food. Our bodies are trying to use those foods as stimulants to stay awake during the day! So, the next time that chocolate cake in the break room starts to speak to you, schedule in a few extra hours of snooze time. You may just find yourself eating less, and feeling better!