Men’s Health Blog: benefits of sleep

Benefits of Sleep: Why is it Necessary to Sleep Well?

Benefits of sleep are numerous! A good night sleep makes you feel better both physically and mentally. But its importance goes much beyond only enhancing your mood or banishing dark circles under your eyes. Sufficient sleep is the key to a healthy lifestyle, fit body, and positive mind. It has a good impact on your weight, heart, mind and so on. As you eat healthily and exercise regularly, you should have a good night sleep of seven to eight hours. But considering today’s busy and fast life, we often fail to afford that much time. As a result, our sleeping pattern changes. Now people not only sleep less, but the quality of sleep declines as well.

This article provides the vital benefits of sleep. Read on to find out the benefits of sleep. They will make you want to make sure that you sleep well every night!

5 Benefits of Sleep

Here are the 5 best benefits of sleep that explain why good sleep is necessary for wellbeing:

1. Good Sleepers are Likely to Eat Less

Sleep deprived people have a common tendency to eat more. That’s because lack of sleep can change brain chemicals that insist cannabis-style munchies. Sleep deprived people have a higher level of endocannabinoid 2-AG. This 2-AG simply ramps up the pleasure of feeling during eating, especially salty and sweet high-fat dishes. Meaning this thing also gets causes people to eat more even if they are not hungry. Severe sleep loss can badly disrupt regular functions of appetite-related hormones leptin and ghrelin. Thus it may result in having poor appetite control.

2. Good Sleepers Concentrate Better and are more Productive

Sleep is vital for enhancement of different aspects of brain functioning. These include focus, productivity, cognition, and performance. They all can be adversely affected even to a degree as alcohol drunkenness, by sleep loss. Good sleep plays a vital role in improving problem-solving expertise. What’s more, it improves memory both in adults and children.

3. Good Sleep Ensures Better Athletic Performance

Longer sleep duration improves different aspects of physical as well as athletic performance. For example, longer sleep duration for basketball players can notably improve their accuracy, speed, mental wellbeing and reaction time. On the other hand, short sleep duration results in poor exercise performance.

4. Longer Sleep Boosts Immune System

Even a little loss of sleep can impair immunity. On the other hand, 8 hours of sleep improves immunity and combats the common cold. People who sleep less are susceptible to common cold and other viral infections than those having longer sleep duration. If you are prone to cold, improving your time and quality of sleep can improve your state.

bacteria and viruses

5. Good Sleep Ensures Sexual Well-being

Less sleep brings on foul moods. If your body feels smashed after few sleepless nights, you are likely to have no desire for having sex. But if you sleep better and rest well, then you will feel optimistic. Neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin production get increased with good sleep. And hence mood enhancement which results in good libido. More importantly, sleep influences testosterone production. And we all know that it is a key factor behind strong libido. And like anything, you should not compromise your libido. But instead, you need to nurture it.

5 Risks of Bad Sleep

Now let’s look at the problems arising due to bad sleep.

1. Bad Sleep Leads to Depression and Sleeping Disorders

Scientists directly link depression with poor and short periods of sleep. They link other mental health conditions to sleep quality, sleep duration, and sleeping disorders as well. Over 90 percent of people with chronic depression have complaints against their quality of sleep. Poor sleepers with depression are even prone to commit suicide. Those who have problematic sleeping patterns often report having depression. These include issues like obstructive sleep apnoea or insomnia.

2. Poor and Less Sleep Triggers Obesity

Poor sleep is directly linked to weight gain. People with short sleep tend to weigh more than that of those having enough sleep. With less sleep, the adrenal gland produces more cortisol that controls appetite. As this hormone increases, people tend to feel hungry despite being full. Overeating boosts the fat issue and thus turns on obesity. In other words, short sleep duration is the key risk factor for overweight and obesity. Further, some factors like hormonal imbalance and not having the will to exercise typically mediate it.

3. Sleep Deprived People are likely to Develop Cardiac Problems

Quality and duration of sleep can have notable effects in growing several risk factors. Those risk factors drive chronic conditions such as heart diseases, stroke and so on. Short sleepers are at greater risk of forming cardio diseases than the good sleepers.

4. Bad Sleep affects Glucose and may Trigger Rise of Type 2 Diabetes

There’s a strong link between short sleep and growth of type 2 diabetes. Sleep restraint can affect blood sugar and reduce insulin sensitivity. Restricting sleep to 4 hours per night for 6 nights in a row can cause symptoms of pre-diabetes. However, making sleep habit stable with more hours of sleep can fix the problem in one week or so. But people who sleep less than 6 hours a night for a longer period are playing with fire. It is because they are at a high-risk of developing type-2 diabetes.

5. Poor Sleepers are at Risk of Risen Inflammation

Sleep markedly affects body inflammatory reactions. Sleep plays a very important role in body’s capacity to fight against inflammation. Loss of sleep usually leads to activation of unwanted pointers of inflammation as well as cell damage. Further, poor sleep can lead to long-term inflammation of the bowel. Hence bad and short sleep may lead to inflammatory bowel diseases or IBD like ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. And that can result in increased risk of recurrence of symptoms. Sleep deprived Crohn’s patients are more likely to recur their condition than those with longer and better sleep duration. Researchers even suggest assessment of sleep pattern of the patients with IBD to better predict the outcomes.

bowel inflammation

 

Time to Fight your Poor and Short Sleep

So as you already know the negative effects of poor and short sleep, you should not neglect the issue. So, visit your physician and ask for a remedy to get all the benefits of sleep. Besides, you should focus on eating healthy and exercising regularly. You never can achieve optimal health goals unless you have a good and proper sleep. So make sure you have it and ensure better health and healthier lifestyle.

wise young man sleeping like a baby

If you are already insomniac and restless, your efforts to get good sleep might not yield the desired results. Especially since your body feels too stressed out to adapt to a new regime that could induce sleep. I have been helping a lot many individuals with this problem.

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