10 Surprising Benefits of Sleeping: How Sleeping Improves Everyday Life.
Sleep is one of the fundamental parts of human life, keeping us physically and emotionally stable. It may seem evident that sleep benefits your body, but today I’ll pin down the specific benefits so you can understand why you should be sleeping!
What is Sleep?
Sleep is an intricate part of the body that the world is still trying to wrap it’s head around. By the time your 80, on average you would have spent approximately 30 years asleep. So what is this mysterious state that our bodies fall into? Well, sleep is a state that our bodies fall into, where our eyes are closed and muscles relaxed, but our brain is still working.
Sleep has two main stages, and the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and the second stage is the Non-Rapid Eye Movement (Non-REM) which is the second stage. REM is when we dream and is believed to be vital to our memory and learning parts of our brains. Non-REM is your relaxing stage, where your body recovers.
Why do we sleep?
Now, I’m a night owl, so I actually dislike sleeping and would rather stay up rather late. However, there are some scientific reasons we should be sleeping.
Even though scientists are still trying to work out exactly why we sleep due to sleep being a very complicated process, scientists do understand the core fundamentals of sleep, and the core reasons why we sleep. During sleep, lot’s of significant restoration and strengthening occurs.
Sleep is like giving your body a mini-vacation and allows your brain to process the memories it has made throughout the day. We sleep to allow our body to recover, and process all the information the mind takes in throughout the day.
How much sleep do I need?
This is a very controversial question, and some people don’t need as much as sleep as others, but there are many good guidelines available to indicate the right amount of sleep we should be getting every day. This allows for your body to recover and have enough energy for the next day.
- Toddlers 1-3 Years Old: 11-14 Hours
- Preschoolers 4-5 Years Old: 10-13 Hour
- Schoolers 6-13 Years Old: 9-11 Hours
- Teens 14-18 Years Old: 8-10 Hours
- Young Adults 19-27: 7-9 Hours
- Adults 28-66: 7-9 Hours
- Elderly 66+: 7-9 Hours
Now take into account this is the amount you need, if your anything like me, sleeping more than these hours sounds great! Now, sometimes you can’t get these hours every day, and that’s perfectly fine, but making sure you don’t turn that into a habit is essential and make sure you do catch up on sleep because it is essential!
Here are 10 Benefits of Sleep!
1. Skin Improvement
When people say they need there ‘beauty sleep’ it may not be completely false. When you sleep, your body creates new skin cells which replenish old skin cells. Your skin is vital and has to be regularly maintained by the body during sleep because you shed lot’s of your skin every day. So every night, your body replenishes skin cells ready for another day, and your body can’t do that if you don’t get enough sleep!
2. Reduces Stress
The Stress hormone is beneficial to our body, it keeps us alive and running throughout the day. However, stress comes from this hormone being produced too highly in your body, so that’s why we have to keep this hormone in check. One of the best ways to lower the body secreting this hormone naturally is to sleep. This will help keep the hormone stable!
3. Stronger Immune System
Having a clear nose is something we take for granted when we have a blocked nose and we remember when we used to breathe normally! If you don’t sleep, your immune system will become much weaker to viruses, making your body much more exposed. A study that was recently performed found that when researches exposed 153 people to a common cold, people who had been sleeping less than 7 hours were three times more likely to contract the common virus.
4. Better Reaction Speed
This something we’ll go through more in-depth below in the article, but is it proven that people who get the proper amount of sleep have much better reactions. Your brain isn’t able to process things around you as fast!
5. Improves Memory
When you sleep, your brain is still continually running to process all the information you gained today, and remember it. If you don’t sleep enough, your brain will not be able to remember everything during the day, and your brain won’t be able to process what you’ve learned today!
6. Less Irritable
I think I speak for many people when I say if you don’t get enough sleep the tiniest things start to annoy you. You have much less patience, and your emotions start to go a little crazy. If you don’t get enough sleep, you will have much less patience and become much more irritated at the little things in life.
7. Better Speech
When you’re drunk, your speech becomes slurred, and you start to form a slow and monotonous style of talking. Well, sleep deprivation is also proven to have this side effect, not on the same level but your speech will become impaired. You might start saying the same words over and over, and that can look bad. So make sure you’re getting the right amount of sleep!
8. Improved Vision
You know when your tired and you rub your eyes, that a direct sign of tiredness. Tiredness has a direct effect on your vision and if you don’t get enough sleep, can negatively affect your vision enormously. Your vision could become tunnel visioned, and a lack of sleep can cause your eyes to have a much harder time focusing. At the worst stage, you can start to hallucinate if you don’t get enough sleep.
9. Work Productivity
If you're not getting enough sleep, you won’t have enough energy to work productively, and that can look bad on your image to your co-workers and boss. If you are noticing you lack the energy to work productively at work, get an extra hour or two of sleep and feel the difference.
10. Safer Driving
Driving is something we have to do every day to transport around, but driving can be dangerous, not because of you but because of the people around you. If you haven’t slept, you won’t be able to focus on the road, which can be very dangerous.
Why is sleep important to athletes?
Sometimes people say sleep is considered to be for ‘the weak’ but, for athletes, sleep is one of the top priorities and necessities that all athletes need to reach their peak performance. Sleep helps athletes with core traits they need whether your skateboarding or playing hockey or any sport!
Sleeping improves reaction times, which is a vital part of all sports. Not enough sleep can make you have much slower reaction times, and cause you to much less alert.
Injuries are one of the worst things that can happen to an athlete; it can cause a career downfall. From someone that has experienced a bad injury, I can tell you it is something you don’t want and is something that will bring your motivation down a lot. However, there are many ways to help prevent injury such as a proper warm up, drinking water, etc.
However, another way that you can help injury, a way that is commonly overlooked is sleeping. Not sleeping causes fatigue which has the ability not to allow your body to recover after a workout, and make you much slower. Also, your immune system is much more vulnerable during a fatigued state, so making sure you sleep before workout or game day is a tremendous way you can prevent injury, making sleep very important for athletes.
Mentally, not sleeping can have a huge toll. Multiple studies have shown if you don’t sleep your memory, decision making, and focus are all negatively impacted. If you don’t sleep, your brain struggles to focus, and you start to make poor decisions. Decision making is probably if not one of the most important parts of all sports, so making sure you are getting enough sleep to support your decision making and focus is vital.
Overall, sleeping is a vital part for athletes to work. Not getting enough sleep can have substantial negative implications, so make sure you're getting the right amount of sleep if you’re an athlete!
Conclusion
In Conclusion, there are many benefits to sleeping, and you should be making sure you are getting the proper amount of sleep, so you get the best out of your day. Thanks for reading and have a great day! Click here for the newest content avaliable!
