Ajax

Healing: During deep “restorative” sleep, blood flow increases dramatically throughout your body as the body begins its natural healing process. This phase usually occurs before REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and accounts for almost 50% of your total sleep time. It’s important to ensure your body is replacing enough cells each night to maintain your health!

Energy: While you are asleep, your body releases significant amounts of human growth hormone (HGH), a compound that is largely responsible for cellular regeneration and renewal. This powerful hormone also plays a direct role in the metabolism regulation and contributes to muscle strength and mass. Your natural testosterone levels increase during deep sleep because HGH is converted into testosterone.

• Memory: While you’re sleeping, your brain uses this time to consolidate everything that you have been exposed to throughout the day. Memories are properly saved in both your short-term memory as well as long-term memory storage while you sleep. In other words, while you snooze, your brain is processing incoming information and storing it for future recall.

Mood: Lack of sleep can leave you irritable and angry, while getting enough rest can put you in a positive mood. During sleep, your brain produces proteins that are responsible for mood regulation; therefore, lack of restful sleep leaves you feeling cranky.

Brain health: Researchers at Harvard Medical School report that people who get an average of 8 hours of sleep every night have higher IQs than those who don’t. They also scored better on memory tests compared to their counterparts who got less sleep.

Aging: Sleep deprivation has been directly linked to aging. As we age, our bodies need more time (approximately one hour more per day) to recover and be restored. This is because we become less efficient at repairing and recovering from bodily damage as we age.

Performance: Losing just one night’s worth of sleep causes impaired performance equivalent to legal intoxication. While this may not come as a surprise to many who have experienced significant fatigue after losing sleep, it is still widely unknown among the general population.

Immunity: When you sleep, your immune system gets stronger through an increase in important white blood cells This helps you fight off different afflictions and keeps your body’s immune system running properly.

Metabolism: During REM sleep, the metabolic activities of the brain increase by as much as 15 percent. This has a direct impact on burning calories because more energy is required to power all of these additional processes.