12 benefits of a good night sleep
Sleeping for Beauty, Health, and Happiness
Your body repairs itself and recovers while you sleep, leading to a list of beneficial changes to how you look, and feel. Sleeping well boosts your immune system, slows down or even reverses aging, and improves your mood, your memory, and your cognitive system.
Start getting 1 to 3 hours of better sleep and you might see instant improvement. Within 2 to 3 weeks of sleeping better, people will comment on how well you look.
Here 12 benefits of sleeping well for beauty, health and happiness
Sleeping for Beauty
1. Fever Wrinkles
Your skin makes collagen while you sleep. The more collagen your skin makes, the less wrinkles you’ll have.
Getting 5 hours a night or less sleep might cause twice as many fine lines as 7 or 8 hours of sleep.
2. Beautiful Eyes:
Puffy eyes and dark circles are a known symptom of not enough sleep.
Stay well hydrated and elevate your head with pillows. Dark circles can also this is the case, be caused by genetics, hormonal changes and pigmentation isuses. No matter what the underlying cause, sleep deprivation will make your dark eyes worse.
3. Fuller, Healthier Hair
Low blood flow, caused by sleep depriviation can cause dry, brittle hair, and slow down hair growth. Without a healthy blood flow, your health follicles will not get the „food”: nutritiens, vitamins and minerals they need for growth. Lack of sleep can lead to more stress, causing an overflow of the stress hormone cortisol in your body. This in turn can cause hair loss and oxidation (bleaching) of hair follicles, which we know leads to white hair.
4. Happier, Healthier Look
When we do not sleep well, our facial expressions change. Burrowed eyebrows, sagging skin, red, swollen eyes, darck circles, and pale, grey skin might be a good look on vampires, but us mortals just look plain exhausted and unhealthy.
Health:
Your body repairs itself while it sleeps. Your heart rate falls, your blood pressure drops, and your body releases hormones that slow your breathing. With less demand, slower heart rate, slower breathing, sleep allows your heart to take a break, your muscles to relax. You start to reduce inflammation and your body begins to heal and repair itself.
5. Reduce Inflammation
Inflammation is a major component in the development and growth of tumors. Many cancers arise from sites of infection, chronic irritation and inflammation. Chronic inflammation may be caused by infections that don't go away and over time, chronic inflammation can cause DNA damage that might lead to cancer.
Poor sleep is strongly linked to long-term inflammation of the digestive tract, in disorders known as inflammatory bowel disease. According to studies, people with Crohn’s disease who sleep well, might reduce their chances of relapsing by 50 percent, compared to those who are sleep deprived.
6. Reduce your risk of heart disease and stroke
Multiple studies found that people who get less than 7 to 8 hours of sleep are at far greater risk of heart disease and stroke than those who are sleeping well.
7. Moderate your Blood Glucose
According to clinical experiments, sleep deprivation has a negative effect in insuling production and blood sugar levels. In an experiment of restricting sleep to 4 to 6 horus per night in a group of otherwise healthy young men for four weeks caused symptoms of prediabetes. Once the men returned to sleep 7 to 8 hours a night, the symptoms resolved.
Sleeping 6 hours or less nighlty significantly increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
8.Boost your Immune System
Even a small decrease in the duration or quality of our sleep can significantly reduce our immune response. In a 2-week study, where they administered nasal drops containig the virus for the common cold to people, they found that those who slept less than 7 hours were almost 3 times more likely to develop the cold than those who slept 8 hours or more.
9.Maintain a Healthy Weight
Inadequate sleep is one of the strongest risk factors for obesity. According to multiple studies, children and adults who were sleep deprived, were 89% and 55% more likely to develop obesity.
Sleep deprivation causes higher levels of ghrelin, which are hormons that stimulate appetite, and reduces the levels of liptins, which are the hormones that supresses appetite. Being exhausted from less than adequate sleep also reduces motivation to exercise, and reduces muscle function and athletic performance, which in turn, increases reluctance to exercise.
Being overweight and obese leads to sleep apnea, snoring, pressure on the internal organs and the lung, and these effects in turn reduce sleep duration and quality leading to a vicious circle of gaing weight and loosing sleep. On the other hand, increased sleep duration can significantly increase phisical performance, endurance, strength, and reaction time.
10, Brain Function
Sleep deprivation negatively affects all brain function, includning cognition, concentration, productivity, and performance. In fact, studies show that sleep deprivation can impact brain fuction similarly to alcohol intoxication. Getting a good night sleep on the other hand can improve all brain function, enhance memory, recall and performance.
11. Mood
Its been estimated that 90 percent of people who live with depression report sleep issues: either they sleep too much or are not able to sleep at all. Those who have sleeping disordes, like insomnia, or obstructive sleep apnea, have also higher rates of depression and poor sleep is even associated by and increased risk of suicide. Sleep deprivation also impacts other mental health issues and extreme sleep deprivaiton in otherwise healthy people might cause psychosis, hallucinations and despair and symptoms usually associated with mental health disease.
Lack of sleep also inhibits our ability to deal with or manage emotional responses, impacts our social interactions and our ability to recognise and correctly interpret facial expressions of emotions.
12. Slow down aging
Most people find that as they age, they have a harder time to fall asleep, wake up more often during the night and wake up earlier in the morning. Many of these changes happen because of the aging, and „wearing out” of the part of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, (SCN) that functions like the body’s Master Clock. The SCN controls the body’s 24 hour circadian rhythms, like when we get hungry, when we are alert and when we go to sleep. If the SCN does not work well, it directly affects when people feel tired or alert: it is not that older people „need” less sleep, it is that their SCN „notification system” lagging and forgets to tell them it is time to sleep.
The SCN gets its cues to control the body clock from the light sensor cells in the eyes but many older people have insufficient exposure to daylight. This is especially true, for those living in nursing homes, or hospitals, and those with Alzheimer’s disease. As people age, their body also secretes less melatonin, which is a hormone normally produced in response to darkness and helps to fall and stay asleep.
Loss of sleep might also be partially be a result of pain and discomfort usually associated with „age-related” pain and aches, muscle stiffness and joint issues, and a variety of health-related illnesses that cause pain and discomfort during the night. Older people are also at greater risk of urinary tract infections and diseases, and might suffer from incontinence or overactive bladder, and they wake up to go to the bathroom more often and have trouble falling back to sleep.
To sum it up, aging-related changes in the body disrupt the body’s natural rhythm and hormones, repair, and healing systems which lead to loss of duration and quality of sleep. The resulting sleep deprivation then causes increased cell damage, illness, depression of the immune system, and emotional and health changes, which are associated with, or speed up aging.
On the other hand, improving sleep duration and quality leads to positive impact and changes in the body, and slow down or even reverse aging.
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