Sleep, Weight, Heart Disease, Diabetes
Sleep is more important, it has been recently found, that most of us have thought. Sleep is important for healing, learning, mood, memory, motivation, managing appetite, and preventing obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and even Alzheimer's. The repercussions of not getting enough good, high quality sleep on our physical and mental health are devastating. Sleep and good sleep hygiene are both catastrophically neglected curative and preventative treatments for many of the chronic ailments that plague us all.
Did you know that there is a direct relationship between poor sleep and obesity? Obesity problems and sleep problems go hand in hand. When we don't get enough sleep, our appetite increases, our cells process blood sugar less effectively, and we have lower impulse control. So, we are hungrier, less capable of processing what we eat, and less able to make good decisions about what it is that we are eating.
In 2003, a group of researchers coordinating from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Health, and other organizations working on health research concluded a thirteen year long study about sleep. They found that in otherwise healthy young adults, a 95% correlation between short sleep (or not enough sleep) and obesity. They also found the reverse to be true, those subjects that slept an adequate number of hours were far less likely to be overweight, or to gain weight over the course of the study.
This study was published in SLEEP in 2004, and concluded that improving sleep was an important tool for preventing and reversing obesity and the health problems that can go along with it. This study took a look at people over the course of thirteen years, checking in on them at different ages. Those with the shortest average sleep times had the highest body mass index by the end of the study, those that had the longest sleep times had the lowest BMI by the end of the study. They also found a correlation between short sleep and diabetes, with those sleeping fewer hours more likely to go on to develop diabetes later in life. Why?
When we are short on sleep, the cells of our body become more insulin resistant. Insulin is released when glucose, or blood sugar, is present in our blood streams. It is released by the pancreas to tell our cells to absorb the glucose out of our blood. This is because, while cells can use glucose for energy, it is highly inflammatory to to the body, it is damaging to our circulatory system and the body needs to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
When we are short on sleep, our cells can't absorb glucose as well. They resist the call of insulin to absorb glucose. The last cells to become resistant to insulin are fat cells, so our fat cells can absorb the sugar, turning it into more fat, but the rest of our body doesn't. We end up staying hungry, and also increasing our fat cells.
Inadequate sleep decreases the levels of the hormone leptin, which allows to feel full and burn fat. Inadequate sleep also increases the levels of ghrelin, the hormone that makes us feel hungry. Inadequate sleep makes us, therefore, ravenous and not good at burning extra calories or fat reserves.
Research shows that people who are short on sleep ate, on average, more than 300 more calories a day than they did when they had had a full night's sleep. Trying to get by on 6 hours sleep is enough to cause this uptake in eating. Based on evidence gathered through sleep studies over the past few years, not sleeping enough is very likely to be a key contributor to the obesity epidemic.
Short sleep has also been shown to be hard on our hearts. 24% more heart attacks occur right after Daylight Savings Time ends, when we lose an hour. The days after Daylight Savings Time begins, when we add an hour, see fewer heart attacks and strokes than any other time.
Sleep is imperative for learning. During sleep, our brains "empty out" our hippocampus, which stores short term memories, and decides what is important to remember, and important to process, and then stores what we need in long term memory. Sleep helps us to put new information into context with things we already know, link memories, and solve problems. Good sleep is crucial to learning.
Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who has been studying sleep, says, after years of intense research, "Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our lives, wellness, and longevity."
Sleep fights infection and illness by ramping up your immune system, which is why your body demands more rest when you are ill or recovering from something. A few nights of not sleeping enough, less than 7 to 8 hours, renders the body more vulnerable to viruses, infections, even cancer. Even a few nights of being short on sleep can reduce cancer fighting immune cells. One study showed that in healthy young men, one night of sleeping only from 3am to 7am reduced the natural killer cells circulating in their immune systems by 70%.
Simply put, in order to feel well and to be well, we simply must sleep well. The trouble is, how?
1. The first step is to practice good sleep hygiene: Get up in the morning, stay up during the day time and go to sleep at a decent hour: 8 hours before your wake up time. This is an important first step because you can only sleep when you are tired.
2. The second step is to make sure you see natural light and get outside during the day to help signal to your brain when wake up time and sleep time are: your brain uses light to keep track of what time it is, and to keep track of when it's time to start to feel sleepy.
3. It's also important to sleep in the dark, for similar reasons, your brain only knows it's nighttime when it sees darkness. Exposure to bright light, especially overhead light in the evening throws off our body's signals that it is time to sleep, and delays the onset of sleep. Think low light in the evening, and complete darkness at bedtime.
4. Sleep in a cool room. Sleeping in a room that is too warm reduces sleep quality, as well. Our bodies are designed to lower their temperature while sleeping. Turn the heat down at night and sleep in a cool, dark room.
5. Reduce Alcohol. While alcohol may make you feel drowsy, it actually impairs sleep. Alcohol literally interferes with our ability to dream, so drinking before bed impacts learning and memory. It also interferes with our sleep cycles, so we end up waking up frequently during the night. This disrupts how deeply we are able to sleep, so we do not get the full benefits of sleep when we have alcohol in our systems.
6. Eliminate Caffeine later in the day: Caffeine allows us to ignore signals that we are tired. It keeps the receptors in our brains for the chemical that builds up during the day, making us sleepier and sleepier the longer we are awake, busy. So we don't know how tired we are. It takes at least 6 hours for caffeine to be cleared from the body, so eliminate caffeine after lunch time to improve sleep onset.
Getting up early in the morning, getting outside in natural light, getting plenty of exercise during the day, avoiding napping, reducing alcohol and caffeine, and getting to bed in a cool, quiet, dark room 8 hours before we have to get up can go a long way to positively impacting our mental and physical health. If this does not improve your sleep, it might be time to see a doctor and have a sleep study done. Ailments such as sleep apnea or other problems disrupt sleep and are also linked with obesity, diabetes, heart failure and stroke, as well as cognitive and memory problems.
Improving sleep and protecting your sleep hygiene are major cornerstones of a lifestyle that allows you to be in your best shape mentally, physically, and emotionally. If you have trouble sleeping, see if you can put any of these suggestions into practice. Also, hypnotherapy can have a powerful impact on sleep. An experienced hypnotist can help not only uncover what might be impacting your ability to sleep, but will also be able to reduce physical and emotional symptoms that prevent falling asleep easily. A good hypnotist will also be able to teach you how to use self-hypnosis at night in order to allow yourself to fall into a deep, restful, restorative sleep.
If you are interested learning more about how hypnosis or hypnotherapy can help you improve your sleep, contact me! Send me an email, comment on this post, or find me on facebook: @Tina M Grasso!
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