There are many aspects of health that are important to keep up with on a day-to-day basis and among the most important of these is a regular and healthy sleep schedule. Irregular sleep can be extremely negatively impactful on your health, which is why it is so important to keep regular sleeping habits. On top of this, there are a great many health benefits to maintaining a consistent and sufficient sleep schedule. This article aims to examine what exactly makes sleep so important to your health, investigating both the positive effects of healthy sleep and the negative effects of poor sleep.
What Is Healthy Sleep?
There are many factors that contribute to the quality and healthiness of your sleep, but in simple terms healthy sleep, for the average adult, is regularly getting between 7 and 9 hours of sleep at roughly the same time every night. This regularity is important as your body runs on a circadian rhythm, which means that consistency in your resting patterns is the best way to help you to consistently and easily fall asleep when you need to.
The Impact of Sleep on Mental Health.
A lack of sleep has a number of negative effects on mental health, included but not limited to exacerbating symptoms of both depression and anxiety in people who sleep poorly, as well as reducing cognitive ability and memory functions as your mind is too tired to maintain peak performance. These reductions in mental ability are often frustrating to those who consistently struggle with sleep and often they are accompanied with issues surrounding emotional health as well. Because a lack of sleep increases the likelihood of experiencing negative emotions, this area of health is vitally important.
The Way Sleep Affects Physical Health.
Sleep has also been shown to affect physical health in a number of ways. An extended lack of quality sleep has been connected to a heightened risk of heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, stroke, and more. These negative effects are obviously unpleasant but are just the tip of the iceberg when compared with the combined effects of poor mental health and the emotional turmoil of combined sleeplessness and increased anxiety and depression.
Ways to Boost Your Sleep Quality.
There are a number of factors that contribute to the quality of your sleep and the best way to ensure that you are achieving consistently high-quality rest is to ensure that you optimize as many of these factors as you can. However, there are a few ways that you can quickly improve the quality of your sleep.
Regular and effective exercise is one way to improve the quality of your sleep. Studies have shown that exercise is an effective way to boost both the length and quality of your sleep, allowing you to get deeper rest in less time.
Another way to boost the quality of your sleep is to improve your comfort while sleeping. Discomfort while trying to fall asleep can keep you from achieving restful sleep, which is why having a comfortable, cool pillow is very important to the quality of your sleep.
This is especially true during the hotter months when many of us struggle to get a good night’s sleep.
Photo by Fa Barboza
Milo Senalle
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