What No One Tells You About Sleep Until Your Health Starts Failing

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Are You Getting Enough Sleep?

Have you taken enough sleep in a while?

No, but I’m still active with 3 to 4 hours of sleep. Coffee helps me a lot. I mean seriously, you are keeping yourself active artificially.

These days, the majority of people are unaware of how necessary adequate sleep is. It’s not a luxury but an essential for your health. When we take inadequate sleep, we unknowingly mess up a lot of our daily work because of that improper or deficient sleep as it is one of the main pillars of health, along with nutrition and physical exercise. If you mess up with any one of these, you are messing with your health ultimately.

A Personal Lesson in Sleep Deprivation

At one time in my life, when I had one of the hardest exams of my academic career, I ruined my sleep by sleeping only 3 to 4 hours per night on most days, thinking I would fix it right after the exam. My brain managed this schedule for one and a half months, but it cost me a lot. I couldn’t sleep properly even after the exam was over, and everyone around me started telling me that it seemed like my health was deteriorating and it was true. With thorough research, I not only fixed my sleep but also came to know a lot of facts about it and decided to share them with others too.

The Science Behind Sleep

If we just touch the neuroscience behind how the body regulates our sleep and what process leads us to be awake and asleep, that’s quite interesting as well. Our sleep is mainly controlled by the circadian rhythm that we all heard of growing up. For simplicity, take it as your body’s internal clock, which repeats after every 24 hours and tells you when to wake and sleep. This is mainly regulated by sunlight (especially blue light), hormones like melatonin, physical activity, and meals.

How Sleep Regulation Works

Let me talk about how exactly it happens. When it darkens outside, signals are sent from our receptors in the eyes to a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which sends signals to the pineal gland to secrete melatonin. Yes, melatonin the infamous melatonin, which makes us sleepy, reduces alertness, relaxes muscles, and lowers core body temperature. Some other factors also help regulate this process. But what about people who work at night time due to night shifts and sleep in the morning? That sleep is mainly regulated by our homeostatic process, in which our brain asks for its required sleep. The longer we stay awake or overburden our brain, there is accumulation of a chemical called adenosine, which makes us drowsy, demanding sleep from our brain.

Why Sleep Is Crucial

This is well known to most of us that we should take 7 to 8 hours of sleep per day. One of the very important things that happens during sleep is that our brain saves the learning and important information from the day. If you are not taking enough sleep, you are doing hard work but not saving. Imagine writing a blog and not saving it, you end up losing it. Similarly you don’t properly learn or retain your daily tasks. We are definitely playing in loss in such situations.

Health Impacts of Poor Sleep

There are researches that say lack of sleep or even excessive sleep is independently responsible for depression among individuals. Disturbing your sleep is like disturbing your brain’s activity. Anything the brain controls will ultimately be disturbed. Very few changes are sudden as most occur over time, like hypertension, poor reproductive health, weak immunity, Alzheimer’s, and the list continues. The more we get to know about the problems caused by it, the more it scares us.

Improving Sleep Hygiene

Sleep hygiene is something one should practice to keep away from sleep disorders. Problems like insomnia, sleep apnea, and depression are so common these days, you can easily count at least one person from your acquaintances who has been through this. Some ways we can improve our sleep hygiene include sleeping early around 10 p.m as it helps us align with our natural circadian rhythm. This way, we are able to experience both NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. If we sleep late, we end up missing our REM type of sleep, in which most dreaming occurs. This is the time when our brain gets most of its emotional and memory-related repair. Hence, sleep is not just about completing hours but also about sleeping at the right time.

Habits for Better Sleep

Making a habit of sleeping at the same time every night helps regulate our body clock. Nowadays, there’s a common culture of drinking coffee in the later part of the day. According to experts, consuming substances like caffeine, alcohol, and heavy meals later in the day is associated with poor quality of sleep, as it disturbs our natural sleep cycle.

Bedtime scrolling is becoming so common these days. As I mentioned above, blue light plays a major role in the regulation of sleep. Cellphones emit blue light, ultimately creating a hindrance in our sleep schedule as wrong signals are sent to the brain through the receptors in our eyes.

Final Thoughts

My own suffering due to improper sleep led me to the discovery of all these details about one of the essential pillars of health. This seemed valuable enough to pass on and create awareness among others. It’s very easy to cut down your sleep, but in the long term, it affects every part of us. It’s a smart and sweet care that we can provide our body to keep it healthy in the long run.