Your Sleep - Your Health - Your Waist-Line

Why you need it and tips for getting restful sleep

Why Is Sleep Important?
You probably heard before that sleep is important for your health. Sleep can help protect your mental health, physical health, quality of life, and safety.  As sleep plays such a vital role your health and well-being throughout your whole life it is crucial to get:
+ enough sleep
+ get good quality sleep
+ sleep at the right times.

During sleep, your body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain your physical health. In children and teens, sleep also helps support growth and development.

The damage from sleep deficiency - too short or bad quality sleep - can occur in an instant (such as an accident), or it can harm you over time by raising your risk for some chronic health problems. It also can affect how well you think, react, work, learn, and get along with others. It also effects your waist line.

Sleep promotes:
+ Healthy Brain Function including improved learning, better decision making, more creativity
+ Emotional Well-Being including problem solving, controlling your emotions and behaviour
+ Daytime Performance and Safety so you don’t suffer from potentially deadly micro-sleeps and instead function well throughout the day. After several nights of losing sleep—even a loss of just 1–2 hours per night—your ability to function suffers as if you haven't slept at all for a day or two.
+ Healthy growth and development – especially in in children and teens
+ Physical Health including healing and repair of cells. Ongoing sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke. Sleep also keeps your immune system healthy to fight infections.

My Fur Baby is always getting a good sleep ;o)

The effects of sleep deprivation (from helpguide.org)
While it may seem like losing sleep isn't such a big deal, sleep deprivation has a wide range of negative effects that go way beyond daytime drowsiness. Lack of sleep affects your judgment, coordination, and reaction times. In fact, sleep deprivation can affect you just as much as being drunk.
The effects include:

• Fatigue, lethargy, and lack of motivation
• Moodiness and irritability; increased risk of depression
• Decreased sex drive; relationship problems
• Impaired brain activity; learning, concentration, and memory problems
• Reduced creativity and problem-solving skills; difficulty making decisions
• Inability to cope with stress, difficulty managing emotions
• Premature skin aging
• Weakened immune system; frequent colds and infections; weight gain
• Impaired motor skills and increased risk of accidents; hallucinations and delirium
• Increased risk of serious health problems including stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, and certain cancers
  

Sleep deprivation can add to your waistline

Ever noticed how when you’re short on sleep you crave sugary foods that give you a quick energy boost? There’s a good reason for that. Sleep deprivation has a direct link to overeating and weight gain.
Sleep helps maintain a healthy balance of the hormones that make you feel hungry (ghrelin) or full (leptin). When you don't get enough sleep, your level of ghrelin goes up and your level of leptin goes down. This makes you feel hungrier than when you're well-rested.

Sleep also affects how your body reacts to insulin, the hormone that controls your blood glucose (sugar) level. Sleep deficiency results in a higher than normal blood sugar level, which may increase your risk for diabetes.
So, the more sleep you lose, the more food your body will crave.

Not enough sleep can be fatal – for you and others

Some people aren't aware of the risks of sleep deficiency. In fact, they may not even realize that they're sleep deficient. Even with limited or poor-quality sleep, they may still think that they can function well.
For example, drowsy drivers may feel capable of driving. Yet, studies show that sleep deficiency harms your driving ability as much as, or more than, being drunk. It's estimated that driver sleepiness is a factor in about 100,000 car accidents each year, resulting in about 1,500 deaths.
Drivers aren't the only ones affected by sleep deficiency. It can affect people in all lines of work, including you, dear reader and the effects might not just be on a personal level but can cause large-scale damage when human errors cause tragic accidents, such as nuclear reactor meltdowns, grounding of large ships, and aviation accidents.

How much sleep do you need?

For adults under 65 it is recommended to have 7-9h of good quality sleep each night. The best way to figure out if you're meeting your sleep needs is to evaluate how you feel as you go about your day. If you're logging enough sleep hours, you'll feel energetic and alert all day long, from the moment you wake up until your regular bedtime. You could be fine with 6 hours or may need 10.

How to get a good night sleep?

+ Stick to a regular sleep schedule – your body has an inner clock

+ Keep your bedroom dark, quiet, cool and tidy

+ Don’t eat too late and avoid stimulating drinks

+ Do something relaxing before bedtime like a meditation, a hot bath

+ Count your blessings and be grateful for what the day brought to you

+ Any problems, worries that cross your mind – WRITE them down to deal with them another time – it’s important to get them out of your head so you can rest assured “they won’t run away”

+ Use Essential Oil Blends or natural products to provide a gentle and natural way to help you drift away into restful sleep so you can awake refreshed and ready to conquer your day.

I personally like and recommend  “Sleep” from Modere (here is the alternative for USA)

Sleep’s calming qualities of lavender, petitgrain, Roman chamomile, valerian and Indian sandalwood will let you drift away. This special blend also helps to relieve sleeplessness and insomnia.

(BTW: You will be gifted $10 shopping credit when using this link and spend $50.)
If you are outside of Australia find your local Modere website and use code 174339 to get connected and the shopping credit)