A Critical Link Exists Between Sleep And Health
Sean is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. He has been working in the health and fitness business for a decade; training, teaching, lecturing, and consulting.
Since childhood, we've all heard the advice that we should get eight hours of sleep a night. With 24 hours in a day, that amounts to a third of the day and, ultimately, a third of our lives.
Scientists are just beginning to find out why we need sleep, and just how valuable it is. For example, in studies on rats deprived of sleep for just five days, the end result was death. Sleep was found to be as essential as food because the rats died just about as quickly from sleep deprivation as from food deprivation.
Experts in the field of sleep research say we all need seven-and-a-half to eight hours of sleep every night. But these days most of us are sleeping less than ever before. In 1960, a survey by the American Cancer Society asked one million Americans how much sleep they were getting a night. The median answer was eight hours. Today that number has fallen to 6.7 hours -- a decrease of more than 15 percent in less than a lifetime.
The effects of this deprivation are only just beginning to be revealed.
In a recent study in which sleep was restricted to four hours per night for six nights, the subjects ended up in a pre-diabetic state. Not only that, but they were more hungry as well. This has lead Eve Van Cauter, an endocrinologist at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, to conclude that lack of sleep may be contributing to the epidemic of obesity in this country through the work of a hormone called leptin that tells your brain when you’re full.
Van Cauter and her team observed that the volunteers actually had a drop in leptin levels. Despite the fact that they'd eaten plenty of food, Van Cauter explains, "Leptin was telling the brain, 'Time to eat. We need more food.'"
Several large-scale studies from all over the world have reported a link between short sleep times and obesity, as well as heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke. What this seems to indicate is that we are not biologically designed to be deprived of sleep. Yet there's no other mammal that sleep deprives itself other than the human. This deprivation puts great stress on the mind and body.
Sleep deprived subjects are found to be hungrier, less alert, and most importantly unable to metabolize sugar effectively, putting them at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes. In fact, Van Cauter says that in addition to aging, overweight/obesity, and family history, sleep deprivation may be a new risk factor for diabetes.
This research indicates that aside from proper diet and exercise, sleep must now be viewed as essential to good health. Ultimately, lack of sleep impacts our appetite, our metabolism, our memory, and even how we age.
So make sure you get about eight hours of restful sleep each night, and don't worry about sleeping a third of your life away.
The good news; napping can help too. Brand new research is showing that long naps, including REM sleep, can even improve emotional outlook, making people less sensitive to negative experiences and more receptive to positive ones.
So go on, get some sleep.
Sean is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. He has been working in the health and fitness business for a decade; training, teaching, lecturing, and consulting.
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Comments: 6
I posted a post about sleep deprivation some time back saying the same thing.
There are reasons that we in the US have a problem with diabetes, and obesity, and that reason is that we don't sleep long enough.