Getting sound sleep is essential for maintaining the proper functions of our body and mind. You can easily understand the importance of sleep when you are sleep-deprived. That is the time you can feel the weakness in your body and cloudiness in your mind. If that does not make you understand the benefits of sleep, this article will definitely help you to know why sleep is important in our life.

7 Benefits of Sound Sleep

1. Maintaining or Losing Weight

One of the greatest benefits if sleep is that it helps in weight loss. If you are sleep-deprived, your appetite tends to increase due to an increase in Ghrelin and a decrease in Leptin. Ghrelin is a hormone that is responsible for making you hungry. On the other hand, leptin is a hormone that makes you full. So, due to these hormonal changes, you end up gorging on unhealthy snacks. Therefore, it is important to have a good night’s sleep to maintain the proper weight of your body.

2. Increases Immunity

Regular sound sleeps can help you boost your immunity. During our sleep, our body produces T-cells and cytokines. Both of these help us fight against infections, diseases, and inflammation. On the contrary, if you don’t get proper sleep, you will fall sick very often due to poor immunity system. So, you need to understand why sleep is important to keep yourself healthy and free from diseases.

3. Better Concentration

Sleep plays a vital role in improving our concentration. This is mainly because your brain needs proper rest in order to be recharged to function well. But if you don’t sleep well and get exhausted, it disturbs the circadian rhythm such as the sleep-wake cycle. Thus, your brain loses its ability to perform any sort of task. At the same time, over-sleeping can also reduce your concentration.

4. Reduces Risk of Heart Diseases

During sleep, our blood pressure tends to go down. But when we lack sleep in our body, our blood pressure goes high. High blood pressure can trigger the risk of getting heart disease or heart attack. Besides, all types of stress during the day may increase the primary stress hormone cortisol in our body. This can raise our blood pressure easily. Sound sleep helps us relax our body and mind. Thus, it keeps the function of the heart normal. Therefore, we must give more emphasis on having a healthy sleep at night.

5. Increases Memory Power

One of the benefits of sleep is that it helps us to boost our memory power. When we sleep, our synapses or links between neurons get reduced. That means it removes all the insignificant or unimportant memories for us. This helps us to develop or create new memories the next day. Besides, according to a report by the National Library of Medicine, sleep plays a vital role in improving both procedural (related to procedures or skills) memory and declarative (related to recalling facts) memory. That is why the students must have a regular sound sleep in order to perform well in their academics.

6. Improves Overall Mental Health

The importance of sleep is not only related to physical health but also mental health. Insomnia can cause depression, and anxiety, and affects the cognitive ability of the mind. The cognitive ability in us help us to think rationally, make plans, solve problems, and deal with complex issues. Lack of sleep can raise the risks of having poor mental health. Besides, a sleep-deprived person feels irritable all the time. Therefore, we can understand why sleep is essential for the overall well-being of a person.

7. Helps in Muscle Recovery and Growth

Sleep has the miraculous power to help in the recovery of a muscle. Not only that, it even helps in muscle growth. When we sleep, we go through two stages sleep – REM(Rapid Eye Movement), and NREM (Non-rapid Eye Movement). While the REM stage is when we tend to see vivid dreams, the last two stages of NREM are the time when we get deep sleep. During this NREM period, the blood flow in your tissues and muscles tends to increase. As a result, the oxygen and beneficial nutrients in the blood start working on repairing the muscle. Also, during sleep, we get the maximum amount of human growth hormone in the body. This also helps in muscle repair and muscle growth.

Now that you know the importance of sleep, you must make a sleep routine to make sure you get enough sound sleep at night. Remember, sleep is in control of your overall health factors. So, to gain all the benefits of sleep, you must make a restful sleep every night a priority in your life.