The benefits of sleep.
How a good night's rest can help you lose weight, protect your heart and more.
By Kathy Baruffi, from Lifetimetv.com
Getting a solid eight hours of sleep each night is like putting money in the bank, providing you with a stash of valuable spending power for the days to come. While you slumber, your brain is as busy as a little power plant, keeping electrical currents flowing and essentially recharging your batteries. Cheat yourself of rest, and it will cost you plenty. Studies show that sleep deprivation negatively alters brain activity, slowing reaction time in certain cellular and chemical activities. For example, during the brain's night shift, hormones help repair tissues, preparing them for a new day of movement; sleep deprivation can leave you prone to injury. A slumber debt also interrupts the brain's electrical patterns, producing a spacey, groggy feeling when you wake up.
"Think of your brain as a symphony in which every musician has a role," says registered nurse Joyce Walsleben, Ph.D., director of the New York University Sleep Disorders Clinic and author of "A Woman's Guide to Sleep." "If certain cells aren't firing on time, it throws everything off, like somebody playing out of tune." When you lack sleep, your entire body performs at compromised levels, meaning you can't be your best at work, in relationships, creatively, mentally or physically.
So, while we know you're busy women with too much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it, we've got five reasons you might want to consider making sleep more of a priority:
Boost your weight loss.Can't ditch those few extra pounds? Getting inadequate z's may have something to do with your lack of diet success. According to studies conducted at the University of Chicago, sleep loss interferes with the secretion of cortisol, a hormone that regulates appetite. If cortisol levels are out of whack, you may still feel hungry even if you've had enough to eat. Researchers also found that carbohydrates metabolize slower when you're sleep-deprived, causing sugars to linger in the blood and jack up insulin production, which increases the storage of body fat and can lead to the development of type 2 diabetes.
Lengthen your life. Lots of behind-the-scenes healing goes on while you snooze, including the repair of cells damaged by normal wear and tear and the bolstering of the immune system. "Sleep impacts the body's defense mechanisms," says Ciete Kushida, Ph.D., a neurologist and sleep specialist at Stanford University. "It is believed that lack of sleep increases susceptibility to viral and bacterial pathogens."
A study from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that good sleep habits are directly correlated to longevity. In a group of healthy people over age 60 who participated in a study for 13 years, those who took longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep were more than twice as likely to die sooner than those who fell asleep faster. The study's authors observed that sleep behavior may be an early indicator of existing health problems, which can affect future health if left untreated.
Enhance your memory. Can't remember which movie you saw last week or the name of someone you just met? You may be able to blame it on lack of sleep, according to a study out of the University of California-San Diego. Researchers found that sleep-deprived subjects have different brain pattern activity than subjects who have the normal eight hours of sleep, and do not perform as well on memory tests. According to John Winkelman, M.D., medical director of the Sleep Health Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, sleep loss interferes with the chemical and neurological processes that "lay down memories" into our brains.
Improve your mood. It's probably not news to you that a lack of sleep results in irritability and decreased motivation, but there's actually a chemical reason for it. "Many of the neurotransmitters in the brain that regulate sleep also regulate mood, which is likely why sleep deprivation is associated with mood swings," says Dr. Winkelman. Neurotransmitters, which carry messages to the brain, get sluggish along the way and need to be replenished during sleep. Subjects in a study at the University of Pennsylvania felt stressed and depressed when deprived of sleep, but when they got adequate rest, their moods significantly improved.
Stay sharp. Cut corners on sleep and you'll hamper your ability to function properly at work and other tasks that require attentiveness and quick reactions, such as driving. "Driving while drowsy is no different than driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs," warns Richard Gelula, executive director of the National Sleep Foundation. Getting your full dose of z's optimizes your brainpower and gives you an edge, helping you avoid mistakes and accidents.
Keep your heart healthy. A study out of the University of British Columbia found that women who get less than five hours of sleep per night are 39% more likely to develop heart disease than women who slept for eight hours. Sleep deprivation can raise blood pressure and cause variations in heart rate, which may contribute to heart disease.
