WHY SLEEP IS SO IMPORTANT?

Do you know we spend almost 1/3 of our life sleeping?

While we are sleeping, many of our body’s basic functions are altered or suspended while other specialised functions continue to occur.

Sleep occurs when your body and brain drop into an unconscious restorative state. We don’t remember most part of our sleep even after spending 3rd of our life in that state.

A good sleep can do remarkable things for you. It allows your body to rest and perform some essential maintenance on your memory, hormones, immunity system and other critical functions. It improves the brain’s ability to learn & relax, helps the body to fight infections, allows our heart to rest by slowing it down and helps in maintaining blood pressure.

Not getting enough sleep can have adverse effects in all these areas, besides others like, it could trigger weight gain or loss.

As we sleep, we are likely to cycle through different stages of sleep multiple times. Doctors & Scientists are still exploring the purpose of the different stages and the impact that they have on the body

Generally, a stage is characterized by the type of brain waves that happens while we sleep.

It is known that dreams happened during the Rapid eye movement (REM) stage and that deep sleep has a restorative effect on the body.

So, how do you know that you are getting the right amount of sleep??

1. When one wakes up feeling rested, you have had enough

2.The amount of sleep someone need is highly individual-driven. On average, adults should get 7-8 hrs of sleep, kids should get 9-13 hrs. and infant should get 12-15 hrs of sleep.

3.Over the course of a day, one builds up sleep pressure and may find oneself nodding off or feeling tired. This your body’s way of saying it needs to sleep.

Tracking our sleep can help us to understand how it may be impacting us. One can keep notes on your sleep journal, log your sleep in an app or use a device that can help analyze our sleep data to build correlations with health & fitness. Therefore, sleep is a very important factor that helps in our fitness journey, be it for fat loss, muscle gain, strength gain or general well-being.

So what do you think, how is your sleep.. do share in the comments.

By Pritma Bhushan

Certified Fitness & Nutrition Consultant

FITTR