Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout your life. Getting enough quality sleep at the right times can help protect your mental health, physical health, quality of life, and safety. During sleep, your body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain your physical health. Unfortunately our environment is interfering with our sleep patterns. The average American slept 6.8 hours a night with 40 percent banking less than six hours. The nation hasn’t always been this sleep-deprived. Back in 1910, people slept an average of 9 hours per night. This this new pattern is not a good thing because sleep is an active time for processing, strengthening, and restoration of your body. Body functions are controlled by sleep patterns.
How Sleep Can Improve Focus and Productivity
Good sleep helps us to think clearly, remember information, and make decisions. When we don’t get enough quality sleep, it impairs our “executive function”—a set of abilities we need to do well in school, at work, and in all realms of daily life. A clear, alert brain allows us to focus, learn and remember information and to be creative. Research shows that we need good sleep to feed our high-level, innovative thinking and problem solving abilities.
How the Brain Consolidates Memory During Sleep
Research strongly suggests that sleep, which constitutes about a third of our lives, is crucial for learning and forming long-term memories. Neuroscientists for the first time a mechanistic explanation for how deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep) may be promoting the consolidation of recent memories. Memories appear to be cemented and formed in all three types of sleep, light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep. The research on learning new skills and motor procedures shows sleep is required. Sleep is beneficial for memory. Sections of the brain – the hippocampus, neocortex and amygdala – that are important in memory are active during sleep. Research strongly suggest that sleep which is a third of our lifetime is crucial for learning and forming long term memories.
How Sleep Clears the Brain
A mouse study suggests that sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during waking hours. The results point to a potential new role for sleep in health and disease. … Sleep in some way serves to restore what is lost in the body while we are awake. Several studies have been conducted on humans and animals. One striking study conducted on animals was to deprive the animals of sleep., Those animals lost their immune function and in just a matter of weeks died. Many of the restorative function in the body like muscle growth, tissue repair, protein synthesis and growth hormones occur during sleep.
Glymphatic System – New Research
The glymphatic system is a recently discovered macroscopic waste clearance system that utilizes a unique system of perivascular tunnels, formed by astroglial cells, to promote efficient elimination of soluble proteins and metabolites from the central nervous system. Besides waste elimination, the glymphatic system also facilitates brain-wide distribution of several compounds, including glucose, lipids, amino acids, growth factors, and neuromodulators. Intriguingly, the glymphatic system functions mainly during sleep and is largely disengaged during wakefulness. The system is managed by the brain’s glial cells, and so the researchers called it the glymphatic system. The system may have implications in headache and in neurodegenerative diseases associated with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
As research continues it proves more and more that sleep is most important to our physical ad mental health.Medical studies have related a lack of sleep to health problems and cognitive impairment. Therefore, experts typically recommend seven to nine hours sleep for adults. Currently, 59% of U.S. adults meet that standard, but in 1942, 84% did. That means four in 10 Americans get less than the recommended amount of nightly sleep, compared with the 11% who did so 70 years ago.
According to the Sleep Better Council, Here Are Some Surprising Facts About Sleep…
- Your brain recharges
- Your body releases important hormones
- Your cells repair themselves
- You need different amounts of sleep depending on your age:
- Newborns (0 – 3 months): 14 – 17 hours
- Infants (4 – 11 months): 12 – 15 hours
- Toddlers (1 – 2 years): 11 – 14 hours
- Preschoolers (3 – 5): 10 – 13 hours
- School-age children (6 – 13): 9 – 11 hours
- Teenagers (14 – 17): 8 – 10 hours
- Younger adults (18 – 25): 7 – 9 hours
- Adults (26 – 64): 7 – 9 hours
- Older adults (65+): Sleep range is 7 – 8 hours
- Men have dreams about other men 70% of the time
- Koalas are the longest-sleeping mammals (at 22 hours a day) while giraffes, which sleep only 1.9 hours a day (in 5- to 10-minute increments) are the shortest-sleeping.
- When dolphins sleep, only half their brain shuts down. The other half stays awake to help with breathing cycles.
- You’ll die from sleep deprivation before starvation. It takes 2 weeks to starve, but 10 days without sleep can kill you.
- Blind people can still see images in dreams.
- Within 5 minutes of waking, 50% of your dream is forgotten, and within 10 minutes, 90% is gone.
Synergy Holistic Health Helps Clients With Their Sleep
At different points through out the year, sleep classes are available.
>> View Upcoming Sleep Events
Contact us (859-525-5000) for more information -or- request and appointment!
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About Synergy Holistic Health Center
SYNERGY Holistic Health Center supports you in your journey towards health, happiness, and wholeness, and to provide a safe space for that transformation to unfold. Our commitment is to honor you and your choices, and to provide guidance, education, and skills to support your goals so that you can experience your optimum health and highest personal potential.
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