7 reasons why a good sleep is important

One of the most crucial yet ignored factors responsible for a healthy lifestyle is Sleep. The reason for your headaches, stress, dormant lifestyle and obesity is inadequate sleep. While most people are aware of the importance of sleep, they cannot manage a good night's sleep due to various reasons, be it work, exams, stress, etc. This post will highlight the importance of sleep and I will suggest you a way to get some.

Sleep brings your stress levels down

During 7-8 hours of good sleep, the body brings down your stress hormone (Cortisol), and produces Testosterone (male hormone) in men, and estrogen (female hormone) in women. These male and female hormones are very essential for a healthy body, and they also increase your happiness hormone (serotonin). If you've ever woken up after a good 7-8 hour sleep, you must have experienced the happiness and satisfaction. That can be not only on Sundays but every day, and your life will become happier, you just have to prioritize your sleep just like you prioritize your work.

Sleep increases memory

Think of your mind as a smart phone with RAM and ROM, what you do all day goes into RAM for quicker access, and what needs to be saved for the future goes into ROM, rest is cleared from RAM. Similarly, things you do in a day are temporarily saved in your mind, until they get saved for future, and the only way that happens is when you provide your mind with enough sleep, so that it could process all the data and clear your RAM for the next day. Just like a smartphone, RAM of your brain can only store so much, and after that it needs to be cleared to store more data for next day. If you don't sleep enough, you will have a hard time remembering things, because your RAM is always full and extra data is not getting saved. This is the reason why it is strongly recommended to get a good sleep the night before your big day, be it any exam or the important project at work. Instead, people tend to do just the opposite of that (stay up all night due to nervousness, or study all night), and end up not giving their 100%, their memory an stress levels are messed up.

Sleep helps manage weight

By lowering the stress hormones and raising other essential hormones I just listed above, sleep can actually help you to maintain your weight. Stress hormone, when raised, increases your body fat, especially around your belly. By far the easiest and effective solution to your increased weight is sleep. This does not mean you can eat anything and everything in the world and solely rely on adequate sleep to achieve your weight loss goals. All the factors need to be taken care of and sleep is one of the very important factors.

Sleep reduces muscle soreness

You must have experienced that agonizing soreness in the muscles, a few hours after your workout which you did after a very long time. To recover from that muscle soreness, sleep plays a crucial role. Muscles get repaired during the sleep, 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep will help recover your muscles for your next workout sessions. Not only it will repair your the torn muscle fiber, but it will also make you grow, each time muscles get repaired, they become slightly bigger than their previous shape. So yes, if you want gain muscle mass, a good sleep is imperative.

Note: Muscles do take time to recover, sleep will only help you get recovered faster. It would still take a coupe of days, provided you are feeding your body essential amino acids.

Sleep curbs inflammation

People who sleep less than 6 hours a night reportedly have higher levels of inflammatory protein which is directly related to health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, strokes. Sleep helps to loer that inflammatory protein in your body, which is why it is always a bad idea to cut your sleep time, no work is important than your health. What are you planning to do with all the money you earned by sacrificing your sleep? Pay medical bills?

Become creative, become focused, improve your scores

As I have mentioned earlier, by sleeping you can save the important information in your brain and get ready for new information. When your brain has good storage capacity, you will less tensed, you will have a sharper focus and you will understand things better. Also, you will find interest in some things, which will make you creative, simply because your mind can take it. All of this cannot be done if your brain is already struggling with last night's thoughts.

Keep depression at bay

If your stress hormone (cortisol) is in control, thanks to good sleep, then you will less likely be a victim of depression, life will be happy for you.

Now how can you make things right?

I know you can't be late for office or school, so getting up late is not an option. So you can to go to bed early, but, there is one small problem in that. You use way too much smart phones and computers in the night and they make you late for your sleep. You need to seriously reconsider if getting late for sleep is good for you or not, especially after reading the above-mentioned benefits of sleep.

Some people tell me that even if they try to seep early, they can't. This happens because your schedule for the day is messed up, and your body is used to sleeping late at night. You need wake up early in the morning for a couple of days and don't sleep during day time. You will definitley feel sleepy on the right time in night.

You also need to watch your coffee consumption in the evening, I would recommend not having caffeine after 4-5 PM.

If you do not workout frequently due to your tiring schedule, I recommend start working out in the morning (or evening, depending upon which time suites you), this will bring down your stress levels and help you sleep.