Sleep – How Important Is it?

Current reports show that the average people now get seven and seven and half hours sleep a night. How important is sleep to your body? According to the recent studies; While you sleep, you go through phases of sleep called “rapid eye movement” every 60 to 90 minutes throughout the night. During these phases, the brain is most active, and researchers believe that it is performing some kind of self-repair. Some specialists say that when the sleep cycle is interrupted and sleep is lost. It has a cumulative effect on the body. Brain’s function is affected, which results in inefficiency and causes of physical ailments.

Substance such as caffeine can for the short term block the chemical compound that signals the need for sleep. However, our brain has a mechanism to cause sleep to occur when our body has not had enough, resulting in what have been called micro sleeps. According to the article from The Toronto Star,”no matter what you happen to be doing, your sleep-deprived brain will periodically go into the first stage of sleep for anywhere between ten seconds and just over a minute at a time.” Imagine driving a car at 30 miles an hour and experiencing a ten second micro sleep. During that time, you would have traveled more than the length of a football field.

Furthermore, sacrificing the needed sleep can weaken your immune system, for it is during sleep that the body produces T cells that fight against pathogens. During sleep our body also produces the hormone leptin, which help to regulate appetite. Indeed, the body needs sleep as much as it needs proper exercise and nutrition.

Is extra work robbing you of much-needed sleep? Even if how busy you are, you need to find some time to sleep in that your body needs. How about anxieties of life and worries about what you have stored up in the future? The wise King Solomon once observed: “Sweet is the sleep of the one serving, regardless of whether it is little or much that he eats, but the plenty of belonging to rich one is not permitting him to sleep.” Ecclesiastes 5:12.