Why is good sleep important for adults : 6 shocking benefits

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You will be shocked to know that avoiding sleep can bring you closer toward death but you will not be killed. So with this you can make judgement how much sleep is important for us. sleep is as important as eating food and exercise. But due to this fast life and our responsibilities towards society, don't allow us to take care of ours. And sleep is also the victim of it. 

There is another type of category of people which are facing sleeping disorder because of their mental issues. 

From this we can easily say that sleeplessness is directly or indirectly linked with our mental pressure.

How much time should we take sleep is depend upon person's age and other factors

Researchers suggest that there is a very less difference between the sleep needs of adolescent and younger children. In this age, adolescents are allowed to sleep as much as they want. An average adolescent child requires 9.5 hours of sleep per night. In mid-puberty, after taking sufficient sleep of 9.5 hours, he or she can feel sleepy during day time. Recommendation for 12-18 years old children is to take 9 hours of sleep per night at least.

Before solving sleeplessness, we will discuss about its consequences so that we come to know its importance and become aware.

Surprising Benefits Of Taking Good Sleep

1)Sleep may help you to lose weight

Some people may think that taking longer sleep will lead to the gain weight but my point here is to take 7-9 hours of sleep. This will help you to lose weight. The reason behind this is sleeplessness leads to stress and stress leads to weight gain. In stress your stress hormones send signals to your body to conserve fuel for waking hours. 

In addition to this, Leptin and ghrelin are two hormones which regulates the feeling of hunger. Where leptin (released by our fat cells) suppresses the appetite and ghrelin is released by our stomach which triggers the feeling of hunger. These two hormones in combined form works as a system to notify us whenever our body requires energy. But when you are not taking poor sleep, the balance between two hormones disturbes and increases craving toward highly containing food stuffs like sweets and salty snacks.

There is a small study which shows that sleep deprivation leads to the decrease in leptin circulation by 18% and increases the production of ghrelin by 28%. The result is, increase in the production of appetite by 23%. But this study is not so clear, this study has to be further examined. And ultimately increases the feeling of hunger and craving.

And another factor that helps you to lose your weight by taking sleep is given below.

"You can lose two pounds of weight overnight by just sleeping. And for the next 6 days you can lose 9 pounds" said Apovian, an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at boston university school of medicine.

According to some studies, about 80% of your weight can lose overnight due to

 water lose after taking 7-8 hours of sleeping. And this water lose may vary according to the person's body type.

2) Good Sleep Maximize the Athletic Performance

As in athletic life there is a great importance of learning, memorising, concentration, mental and physical health. There is a limited number of studies which show the impact of sleep deprivation on athletic performance. Reilly and Deykin noticed a decline in a range of psychomotor functions after compromising with one night of sleep. Their lung power, endurance running, and muscles strength remain unaffected. And the same test is done with females, their gross motor performance is less affected than the tasks which require fast reflexive time. 

Another round of this test is to extend their sleep as much as possible for athletes. This went up for 2 weeks. Their performance in sprint times was increased and free-throw accuracy was also improved. There are observable increases in their mood, vigour and decrease in fatigue. 

3) Sleep Improves Our Immune System

T-cells are a type of immune cells. They play an important role in the immune system of the body. The role of the T-cells is to kill the virally infected cell that comes from outside the body and prevent our body from various intracellular pathogens such as HIV, flu, cancer cells (breast cancer) etc.

Whenever virally infected cells come into our body, our cells recognize them and activate integrins, a sticky protein that attach with infected cells and kill them.

But adrenaline and noradrenaline are two stress hormones and pro-inflammatory molecules prostaglandins restrict integrins to stick with virally infected cells. And hence does a destructive effect on our immune system.

During sleep the quantity of these stress hormones reduces and let integrins to stick with infected cells and to kill them.

Therefore stress hormones reduce the working efficiency of the integrin or immune system. So sleep is important to maintain the levels of stress hormones and working of the immune system.

4) Poor Sleep Leads To Inflammation

According to new study, resisting sleep even for a few hours can cause inflammation in the body. This mistake can even turn your immune system against the healthy tissue and organs. Avoiding just one night of sleep can stimulate the key cellular pathway that produces tissue damaging inflammation. what more inflammation can do to your body

• it can causes pain
• it will makes you more stressed at the time of bed
• it directly affects the sleep centre in your brain
• you can also get less REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep
• you probably get snoring problem
• you may face difficulty during falling and staying asleep

According to dr.Teitelbaum, the stress hormone cortisol should be higher in the morning and lower during night but inflammation disturbs the balance between, it can raise the level of stress hormone during sleep. As we earlier discussed the impact of stress hormones on the integrins , , and plays an important role to immune our body. So it will also affect our immune system.

5) Sleep Is Good For Your Skin

Whenever we take good sleep our stress hormones fall and which helps further in the production of collagen which repairs all the damage that happens to skin during day time. The proof of this fact is that whenever you take bad sleep or take less sleep you get

• swollen eyes
• paler skin
• hanging eyelids
• dark circles
• more droopy corners of mouth
• and also get more wrinkles on your face and fine lines.

During sleep, the flow of blood in the vessels increases and organs rebuild its collagen. Meanwhile our repairing the damage of U.V. exposure during day time and also repairs the wrinkles and ageing spots on your skin.

So want you can do to make your skin more charming :

• get proper and quality of sleep to get rid of this (take 7-9 hours of sleeping daily for teenagers and for adults
• wash your face before going to bed (this will relax your body and helps to get good sleep)
• place a glass of water besides your bed (so that you don't have to go to drink water while you are sleeping)
• sleep on your back (it is good for your skin but also with this it has other benefits such as it is good for your food digestion, acidity problems, etc)
• elevate your head while sleeping (this will remove your bags and circles under your eye by improving blood flow. In addition to this, it will also cure other problems such as snoring, nasal drip and acid flux)
• stay away from lightened places while sleeping (because this will damage your sleep rhythms and even be more damaging to your body)

These are all the benefits to our skin. For getting these benefits you may have to pay hundreds of dollars but really good sleep can do all these benefits free of cost without any side effects.

6) Sleep reduces stress and anxiety

when you are not getting proper sleep you might have noticed that you feel irritated and become less patient. This can increase the chances of getting stress.

It is very interesting to know that sleep and stress are inter-depend on each other. Whenever you are not taking good sleep, you feel stress and whenever you are feeling stressed, you will face stress. This is because of the hormonal imbalances. This is not the end, this is the starting of issues because stress has its own effects on body such as : we need third party

• Heart Diseases (stress increases the rate of heart beat and blood flow which increases the release of cholesterol into your bloodstream)
• Asthma (stress can even develop the asthma in kids)
• Diabetes (stress increases the glucose level in the sugar)
• Obesity (stress will increase the production of cortisol hormone that increase the amount of fat in the abdomen region)(how to reduce get by changing diet)

• Headache (stress is not only the cause of headache but can also become the cause of migraine)
• Depression (it is not surprising fact that stress is directly linked with depression)
• Gastrointestinal problems (this can further causes heartburn and irritable bowel)
• Accelerated aging (chronic stress accelerates premature aging by decreasing DNA telomeres)
• Premature death ( as we discussed stress leads to heart attack, depression, cancer. This will automatically leave adverse impact on health and ultimately shortened our life)
• Alzheimer's disease (the link between stress and Alzheimer is not that clear. As we know stress leads to depression which is a known factor for Alzheimer)

But you can stay away from all these problems by taking care of just one parent problem, stress. By curing just one issue, in return we can get better

• concentration power 
• judgement skills
• memorise power
• calmness 
• regulates mood
• decision making

The main subject to worry is, we don't get sleep in our eyes whenever we are facing stress. For this we have to go to the second option like taking drugs, but if you will take these drugs for a longer period of time, their effect on your body will be faded. You can do exercise or any physical work. This will help to balance your hormones. The best thing to do is meditation (vipassana meditation) which helps you be in the present situation, without taking tension of unwanted things that are going on in your mind all the time. 

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