A lack of quality sleep will affect every major body system and your mind, affecting your future health. Today one-third of adults for not get the recommended amount of sleep. Are you one of them?
Sleep affects every major physiological system. People who only average 5 hours a night have a 65% increase in all-cause mortality. In other words, they have a 65% higher chance of dying for any reason compared to people who get sufficient sleep. Sufficient sleep would be considered 80% of the time you get good quality 7 to 8 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, we cannot push the limits all week and then recover on extra weekend sleep, the damage that is done daily when we shortchange our sleep, is not repaired by weekend binges. Although the binges do feel great! :)
A shortage of sleep will affect our anxiety levels, can cause depression, it will affect our digestive system, and create digestive problems, and we all know that is no fun. A lack of sleep can cause headaches and heart disease. Not getting enough sleep will affect our hormone levels impacting our reproductive process as well as causing weight gain.
Your immune system will be affected. Just one night of four hours of sleep will create a 70% drop-in natural killer cell activity. Killer cells are just what they sound like, they go after and kill the cells that cause illness. This is a huge compromise for our immune system, so if you did not get enough sleep last night be sure to take extra precautions to stay healthy the next day.
In another study where DNA was measured in people when they got 6 hours of sleep compared to when they got 8 hours of sleep, there were 711 genes with distorted activity when they only had 6 hours of sleep. This means a lack of sleep will affect our DNA expression, which will ultimately affect our health.
1.6 billion people participate in an experiment twice a year and we call that Daylight Savings time. When we spring ahead there is a 24% increase in heart attacks and accidents and in the fall when we gain that extra hour there is a 21% decrease. Hmm, that should tell us something!
Winter is here it is a great time to focus on better health, starting with better sleep. Let's enter the New Year with energy and excitement.
Join us on January 13th for a New Year Reset, train your body to sleep well and enjoy the benefits all year long.
0 Comments