Have you ever heard, if you snooze you lose?
Well, it’s actually completely the opposite.
YES! If You Don’t Snooze, You Lose! – Tweet this!
Seriously, did you know that one of the most critical aspects to keep our body regulated is not what we do during the day, but what happens at night (get your mind out of the gutter, even though that is also really important). I’m talking about how we sleep.
As a mother of four, I completely get you, and you are likely laughing at the thought of a good night sleep, because it’s probably been years since you had a good night’s sleep without a foot or some other body part of one or more of your kids in your face…
I completely get it!!!
Sleep had been a lot time coming (my baby is 3 and my oldest is 11). I finally can contemplate the word sleep, The truth is that even when the kids were younger, I kept sleep on my top priority list, and here’s why: When we fail to get enough sleep, our bodies are unable to put out the effort needed to do all the important tasks like removing toxins, leading to hormonal imbalances and inflammation.
Even though most of us try to scrape by with as little as we can, getting enough sleep
- Normalizes cortisol levels,
- Improves memory
- Helps to control weight and
- Overall slows down inflammation.
Our body doesn’t consume much energy while we sleep, so it leaves more energy available over eight or nine hours per night for the body to remove toxins, make hormones, activate cellular repair, boost the secretion of growth hormone, mend injury, and fight infections.
So we all need sleep!
In the short term, sleep deprivation can cause mild symptoms of tiredness, irritability, a decrease in the quality of your life, attention deficit, depression, anger, and anxiety. One is also susceptible to decreased performance and alertness, impaired cognition and memory, increased appetite because of stimulated ghrelin (a hormone that tells the brain you are hungry), suppression of the hormone leptin (which tells the brain you are full), and holding on to fat.
Just by decreasing your sleep for one night by only one and a half hours could reduce your daytime alertness by as much as 32%!
Sleep helps to regulate most of hormone production. Fifteen percent of our DNA is controlled by our circadian rhythm, including our body’s repair mechanism. Lack of good circadian rhythms is also associated with numerous serious medical illnesses, including mental and emotional disturbances (like being twice as likely to feel depressed or anxious and encounter other mood issues), quadrupling your risk of cancer, doubling your chance of obesity and being linked with diabetes, insulin resistance, increase in an inflammatory marker called hsCRP (which is a strong predictor of heart disease) and an increase in your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Not getting good sleep is also related to something known as frontal lobe syndrome, which involves
- Confusion
- Impulsivity
- Poor judgment
- Inability to perform tasks, and
- Catatonia
So do you see how important sleep is!
We literally need sleep to heal, now that is my kind of healing! – Tweet this!
Join me next time as we discuss how we can optimize our sleep so we can optimize our life. Yay!!!
Remember to find more at www.holisticmommd.com and watch out for my new course- Real Healing for Real Life.
Can’t wait to see you guys next time…I think it’s time for a nap right…lol…
RELATED ARTICLE: Putting 9 Stress Management Techniques In Play!
Taking Your Life Back,
Madiha Saeed, MD ABIHM
Holistic Mom, MD
PS: Get your FREE copy of Healing Bundle.
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