How Many Hours of Sleep Do You Really Need?

Sleep is absolutely essential for your health, but when life gets busy it’s often the first thing to get neglected or sacrificed. This is unfortunate because a good sleep is just as vital to good health as eating healthy foods or getting enough exercise. Why sleep is so important to your health and how much you should be getting each night?

One of Fundamental to Good Health.

Sleep is more than just a time for your body and mind to rest. In fact, while you’re asleep, your body is hard at work. During this time your body rebuilds muscles you’ve worn down during the day and cleans away harmful plaques and waste that are produced in the brain. These are vital processes that keep both your mind and body in running order. Your mind also processes and responds to important emotions and experiences from the day and commits them to your memory.

Sleep is also essential to regulating your emotions. In fact, being sleep deprived for just one night can increase your emotional response to negative feelings by 60 percent. Not to mention, a lack of it makes it difficult for your body to regulate essential things like controlling your appetite immune system, good metabolic function and your body weight. Lastly, sleep plays an important role in regulating your internal body clock.

This inner clock runs on an approximately 24-hour schedule and regulates when you feel awake and sleepy. It may also help regulate things like your metabolism rate, immune function and inflammation. Not sleeping long enough, sleeping at odd times of the day and exposure to bright light at night may throw off this inner clock and all processes it regulates.

Guess what, not all sleep is created equal. Not only is it important to get enough each night, but it’s also important to get good quality sleep. Nevertheless, there’s no universal measurement for sleep quality. However, it may be measured as how long it takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake up during the night, how rested you feel the next day or how much time you spend in different stages of sleep.

After a healthy diet and exercise, a well rested sleep come next. And because good sleep is necessary to so many aspects of good health, you should make getting enough each night a high priority.