Sleep: The benefits and costs

Sleep is a key foundation to living a functional healthy life!

A solid night of good quality sleep has many beneficial functions including:

✔️Increasing life span

✔️ memory consolidation

✔️ Improving creativity

✔️ Aiding with weight loss

✔️ Keeps you slim and lowers cravings

✔️ Protects against cancer and dementia

✔️ Increases immunity

✔️ Helps to regulate mood, making you happier, less anxious and less depressed

Sleep deprivation

Sadly the opposite is true of sleep deprivation! Currently 2/3 of adults throughout developed nations are not getting the recommended average of 8 hours sleep per night!

Sleep is so often traded for late night work, early exercise or socialising. While these create an important balance in our lives sleep deprivation has scary consequences:

• Sleeping for just 6 hours for ten nights in a row results in impaired performance (on the road or elsewhere) as if you had just pulled an all nighter
  

• After 17 hours awake your focus is similar or worse than someone with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%
  

• One night of sleep deprivation leads to increased action of your amygdala leading to amplified emotional reactivity
  

• Sleep plays a key role in cleaning the Alzheimer causing amyloid plague from the brain and well as consolidation memories memories
  

• Sleeping less than 6 hours per night is associated with increased cardiac arrest risk
  

• Healthy males that slept only 5 hours per night for a week showed a reduction in testosterone levels

Getting your 8 hours is so key to living a functional life!