How to Tap Into the Enormous Benefits of a Regular Sleeping Cycle

Note: This post is written by Alex Moore In our fast-paced, always-on society, sleep can feel like an enormous waste of time. With so much pressure to get ahead, work hard, and put in as many productive hours as humanly possible, it might feel hard to justify spending an entire third of every single day lying in bed doing nothing. If that’s how you feel, though, you don’t really understand the importance of sleep. As it turns out, sleeping is the furthest thing from doing nothing: it’s actually an important and valuable activity that scientists claim is at least as important to our survival as eating or drinking water. If you can build a healthy sleep habit and know how to get the most out of your sleeping cycles, you will see enormous benefits in every area of your life which will more than make up for the time you “wasted” in bed. The Importance of Sleep Everyone has a vague idea of the consequences of getting or not getting enough sleep. You either wake up feeling refreshed and energized or drowsy and bleary. Given that you can overcome any amount of drowsiness with enough coffee, most people do not consider waking up tired that big of a deal. Recent research, however, reveals that a sleep debt can have a surprising and dramatic range of negative health impacts: Increased risk of viral infection, since the immune system lacks the resources to produce disease-fighting cytokines without sufficient rest; Increased weight gain, as the appetite suppressant leptin is ...
Source: Life Optimizer - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Source Type: blogs