In this Health Minute article I want to touch upon the fact that our sleep quality affects our overall health in various ways. Learn the connection between sleep quality, disease, and stress, and how sleep plays an important role when it comes to both our physical and mental health.
If you’re constantly feeling depressed, anxious or simply low on daily energy, you may not sleep well at night. In this case it may be worth looking into the way you sleep and the quality of the sleep that you’re getting every night.
You see, when we don’t sleep well our mind cannot relax and our body cannot regenerate and repair properly. Sleep is extremely important for our overall health because sleep is a time when our body repairs and regenerates.
When it comes to our physical body, we use sleep in order to relax the muscles, joints, spine, and basically our entire physical body. But during sleep our whole body also repairs and regenerates itself at the cellular level. During sleep the body fights off invaders, eliminates waste, and does many of the processes that keep the body healthy..
When it comes to our mind, the situation is even more complicated. Our mind is awake during your sleep and it operates at a different “level” compared to when we are awake and conscious.
So basically, if the quality of your sleep suffers, or if you’re not getting the right amount of sleep, your body will start to slowly deteriorate. You will get weak and tired, while dis-ease and disfunction will start to install in the body. With time you’ll get pain in various parts of your body, get more colds each tear, develop muscle tensions, etc.
Without sleep your body won’t be able to repair itself as fast as it brakes down. Think of sleep as a time when your body can take care of itself. The lack of quality sleep leads to a lowered immune system which in turn will have a negative effect on your overall health.
Our body brakes down in every second but we also build new cells and fight invadors in every moment. When you don’t allow our body do its magical thing, to repair and regenerates properly, and if this period continues for months or years, that’s when serious health problems start to appear.
Your mind is the same … if you don’t sleep enough, your mind starts to get into the sympathetic dominant state which is the fight-or-flight state. That’s a fancy way of saying that without sleep you feel tired all the time. When you are tired you are alert, worried, stressed, exhausted mentally and physically, and so on.
Furthermore, in this mind-stressed state, your perceptions become more and more affected on a negative level. You start to focus more and more on negative outcomes. Why? Simply because without sleep you’re in a constant state of stress and anticipation. You feel that something bad is going to happen and feel the beed to take all possible measured to counteract this imagined event.
I hope that you’re starting to see the problem now …
The result of living is this constant state of stress due to lack of quality sleep is simply that you start to make different choices that are equal to the way that you now feel. This simply means that you are now making more “negative” choices because that is the way that you are feeling.
I hope that you see how the lack of sleep can be a big problem for our physical health but also, maybe even more important, for our mental health.
Lack of sleep leads not only to health problems at the level of the body, but also tension and stress at the level of the mind. This mental stress leads to making poor lifestyle choices that, in turn, will affect your overall health even more so.
The good news is that sleep can be your ally. How is this possible? Know that sleep is the best way to rebuild your body stronger, and your mind more positive, both of which will make you healthier and happier.
Take care of yourself by prioritizing sleep. Take the necessary measures to deep sleep and your mind and body will thank you by keeping you healthy and positive.
Hope this makes sense, thanks for reading and see you on the next one!
