why is sleeping important for us?

One thing anyone in the medical science will tell you is that if human beings (and most other mammals alike) don’t get enough sleep they become ill and can even die.

It doesn’t take long at all for the effects of lack of sleep to be felt. If you have ever flown from one side of the world to the other or stayed up all night studying you must know how badly even a mirror disruption to our sleep patterns can affect us. Haven’t we all gone along to exams or job interviews after a sleepless night and said to ourselves ‘If I had had a decent night’s sleep, I would have performed so much better.’?

If you keep a person awake for more than 72 hours they begin to have hallucinations and, beyond that, their physical and mental health deteriorates further. But it is not just a problem of physical exhaustion. Even if we are able to lie down in a comfortable bed, if we can’t sleep we feel tired the next day. Sleep deprivation seriously affects brain function; it also suppresses the growth hormones and can affect the immune system, hence the ability of the body to heal wounds. Moreover, recent research shows that obesity might have lack of sleep as its main cause, simply because the hormones that regulate glucose metabolism and appetite are disrupted by sleep deprivation.

It is not certain why this should be so and it is rather frustrating to hear that no matter how busy people have become in the last decades, they still need to sleep for about 8 hours every night in order to ‘function’. Clearly, if we didn’t spend a third of our lives sleeping we could accomplish much more.

Sleep scientists study the fortunate people who, for whatever reason, need substantially smaller amounts of sleep than others. If they were able to unlock the secret of those who can get on by a couple of hours sleep at night, the rest of us could benefit greatly, because we wouldn’t feel so anxious if, for some reason, we were unable to sleep from time to time. You may like to check Memory foam mattress toppers for mattress which helps in getting relaxed sleep.

http://medsavailable.com/articles/sleep/why_sleeping_is_important_for_you