Sleep – The Neglected Ingredient for a Healthy and Happier Life

There is something we all have at our disposal, that is an innate part of us, nature at its best, that if we were to utilize it more we’d be better off.  We’d manage our lives better, we’d be less prone to stress and when we would experience stress we’d be better able to handle it.

SLEEP – an essential part of life and of living and coping well.

As a society, we are sleep deprived.  We poo-poo it and yet we walk around exhausted and stressed to the hilt.  A lot of people tend to flaunt their lack of sleep as if it’s cool,“I only slept 3 hours  last night.”  (It’s like the people who love to say how busy they are.  Somehow it makes them seem important and needed.)   I have been guilty of saying that sleep is overrated; that they’ll be plenty of time for that when we’re under the earth; that now there’s so much living to do. I was missing the boat by not recognizing how truly important sleep is to just that – to living well.

We’re doing our body and our entire selves a tremendous disservice by getting too little sleep.

In our quest to be super productive we pride ourselves in staying up into the wee hours of the night working.  We keep going like a machine, like the energizer bunny who, with its long-term batteries, continues on endlessly.    But we’re not a machine and we certainly don’t want to wait until our batteries just stop.  That may be too late.

Then to add salt to the unhealed wound of fatigue, when we feel we need that extra boost to keep going against our natural feelings of tiredness, we start with substitutes: coffee, pills, Coke, the stuff that will give us that onward charge.  And then on the other end, when we lay our heads down on our pillow, we begin to need the other anti-nature aid – sleeping pills.

Our bodies must have the chance to rest and recover.  Some of our best healing comes during sleep.  The expression, “let me sleep on it” has a lot of merit and truth.  When we sleep our brain is working things out and that’s why we can wake up feeling more clear about a problem or with a solution that ‘miraculously’ just came to us.

There is a fairly high correlation between lack of sleep and stress and anxiety.  We can be more irritable and moody, easily set off.  (Of course we can also say that anxiety causes an inability to sleep, be it to fall asleep or stay asleep.)

So what is sleep important for?  It’s crucial for:

Emotional stability, mental health

Cognitive functioning:  memory, decision-making, focus

Productivity

Immune system-   when we don’t get enough sleep, we get sick more often

Sex drive – fatigue kills libido

Weight management –  fatigue promotes junk food binges to give that boost of energy as an antidote to exhaustion , thereby adding to the obesity epidemic.

Big health issues – heart, blood pressure, diabetes.  There is much research and studies on the correlation between sleep and heart disease.

 

So how much sleep is enough?  In general, we need between 7- 8 hours of nightly sleep; children and teenagers need more.

And Winston Churchill spoke of the importance of the nap:  “Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”

A power nap of 10 – 20 minutes is a great revitalizer.  In fact some businesses are creating nap rooms and encouraging people to take nap breaks.

We can always say we don’t have time to sleep but as Tal Ben Shahar, positive psychologist says, “We don’t have time not to sleep.”   We need sleep to function well, to cope with our challenges in a healthy way,  to keep ourselves in tip-top shape and to live in a peak state.

 

So where do you fall on sleep time?  Are you giving yourself some good shut-eye?  Or are you the continuous bunny running on the threat of empty?

I’d love to hear from you.  This is just beginning to gain a lot more public attention as to its importance on our health and well-being.