Benefits Of A Good Night’s Sleep For The Body And Mind

Sleep is for the body like an intensive cure. The benefits of good sleep for the brain and body are many: it repairs it physically, psychically and emotionally. Relentlessly, the brain has a hard time retaining memories, learning, and finding solutions to problems. Sleeping not only influences physical appearance, how we feel or function during the day, but also improves mood, strengthens the immune system and recharges energy.

For many people, it is a precious gift, a pleasant activity that brings well-being. However, for others falling asleep is a real problem, as for insomniacs.

There are those who even consider it a procedure that they are forced to go through every night, so they skimp on hours of rest to earn them a day. And while that strategy may seem effective in the short term, it has the opposite effect in the long run: Without enough rest, the ability to enjoy new experiences and acquire information plummets.

Getting too little sleep can compromise health, emotions, and relationships. Getting plenty of rest, on a regular basis, is as necessary as eating; in fact, if we tried to stay awake for days or weeks, we would die.

What do we sleep for? The brain reorganizes itself during sleep

Until just half a century ago it was believed that when sleeping the brain simply switched off. That it was a kind of dead time, in which nothing happened, except that he rested. For science it was a mystery why humans and other animals devoted so many hours to sleep. Didn’t it make them more vulnerable to attack?

Why devote a third of your life to sleep with everything that could be done in its place?

The first scientist to envision the importance of sleep was a German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, who realized that the brain had a very active secret night life. At the end of the 19th century, he indicated that sleeping perhaps served to consolidate memories, prevent the experience of the day from being erased and allow the next day to continue acquiring information.

However, the scientific community of the time considered that idea crazy and it took almost a century for advances in neurobiology and brain imaging to show that, while we sleep, the body rests but the brain continues to work at full speed.

How are memories made?

It was observed that, when sleeping, the brain barely reduces its activity by 20% and that in certain phases of sleep, such as REM ( rapid eye movement or rapid eye movement ), brain waves are produced on a very large scale. similar to those that occur when you are awake.

Moreover, it was found that groups of thousands of neurons are activated in a synchronized way at a stable rate of one to four beats per second during the periods called slow sleep.

It was clear that the brain was not simply resting but doing something else. But what?

During the night, the brain is in charge of nothing less than processing, ordering and filing the information that has been learned during the day. Select the one that is relevant and classify it to be able to use it the next day effectively. It also gets rid of the one it does not consider important. And how exactly he does that remains a mystery.

A memory is formed by establishing a connection between several hundred or even thousands of neurons. Each time the memory is evoked, those combinations or patterns of synapses are reactivated. But for those connections to be fixed, the memory must first go through a long and complicated process by which it is stabilized, strengthened and finally stored.

The first hours after the acquisition are crucial. It is stored in the hippocampus, waiting for the brain to decide what to do with it, and there it must compete with thousands of other memories and information to make space between neurons. If you cannot look closely, you will have interference; that is, it will be mixed with other memories. Or the brain may throw it away and be lost forever.

What the dream does is reinforce the connections between nerve cells, strengthen them, so that the memory is consolidated and does not mix with other similar ones.

Check it out with the pillow: we make better decisions while we sleep

Emotions play an essential role in this process. It is much better remembered what has moved us. Neuroscientists believe that this is so because the parts in charge of generating them, such as the temporal lobe, also participate in the storage of information.

Different regions of the brain are activated during sleep “on demand”, as required by information processing.

In a 2005 study , some pianists’ brains were monitored as they learned a complicated score and saw regions such as the left cerebellum, motor cortex, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex being activated. These areas deal with the speed and precision of finger movement on the keyboard.

At night , when the musicians slept, the brain returned again and again to the synapses or connections that had been established during learning. The next day, the pianists performed the piece better.

Often times, important decisions and solutions come after “consulting” you with the pillow. Sleeping brings clarity to face the puzzle of life. This is so because, in addition to strengthening memories, the brain analyzes the data to discover relationships between them, identify the essential and discard the unnecessary.

The importance of getting enough sleep: how many hours of sleep does it take?

Famous people such as Napoleon, Churchill or Margaret Thatcher claimed that they barely needed four hours of sleep. And although there are those who just need little sleep, scientists agree that, for an adult, the recommended rest figure is between seven and eight and a half hours.

However, there is no magic number and each person has their basal sleep requirements or hours of rest necessary to be in optimal condition the next day. Children between three and five years old, for example, usually need about 13 hours, while those between 10 and 12 years old sleep slightly less, about 10 or 11 hours.

Sometimes, you try to scratch a few hours off the break to extend the day and perhaps work more, or do social activities. It may be thought that this makes better use of time.

However, not getting enough sleep can lead to many problems in the short and long term ; inappropriate rest stresses our biology, which is not ready to be deprived of sleep.

In fact, humans are the only animal in nature that voluntarily sleeps less than necessary.

Let’s see some of the consequences of this lack of sleep:

• To begin with, not resting creates impatience and makes concentration difficult.
• It hinders learning and the acquisition of experiences.
• Thought becomes hazy and words are difficult to find, as the frontal lobe, associated with speech and creative thinking, is affected.
• It also reduces energy and increases irritability.
• In addition, an inappropriate rest is related to the tendency to obesity.
• Continued lack of sleep can disrupt carbohydrate and sugar metabolism, increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes.
• It also triggers the secretion of cortisol, the stress hormone, whose excess favors the accumulation of fat in the abdominal area.

“Not getting enough sleep reduces the levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite and, on the contrary, increases the amount of ghrelin, which is responsible for stimulating the appetite,” says Jose María Ordovás, one of the leading experts in the world in nutrigenomics, in charge of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory of Tufts University (USA), and researcher at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (Madrid).

But sleeping more than necessary on a regular basis is also not beneficial for the body. It has been seen that more than nine hours of sleep per day for an adult carries as many health risks as sleeping less than six and is associated with high morbidity.

The protective power of melatonin

Eight hours of rest a day strengthens the immune system and can be a good prevention against cancer.

Harvard researchers studied women who worked nights and found that they had a higher risk of developing breast and colon cancer than those who worked day shifts.

The explanation could be found in melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, located in the brain, which is responsible for regulating the circadian rhythm ; When it gets dark, it signals the body to “turn off.”

The women in the experiment, when working at night, had the lights on, which prevented the production of melatonin and the scientists found that this was linked to an increased risk of suffering from this disease.

The socializing power of dreams

As necessary as sleeping is dreaming.

Every night we spend an average of two hours making up stories; It occurs in the REM phase, the deepest sleep phase, in which brain regions used in learning are stimulated.

In addition to the fact that it can be pleasant to spend the night participating in incredible fantasies, visiting other places, making new relationships, perhaps flying, dreaming is also a kind of emotional training.

Surely, this unconscious narrative capacity is – affirms Nicholas Humphrey, professor of Psychology at New York University, known for his studies on the mind and consciousness -, one of the keys to our evolutionary heritage and has more weight in the human being than in any other animal.

“In dreams we become protagonists of stories, heroes, in all kinds of characters and these representations throw us into extraordinary social situations, of love, of danger, of sadness, of anger, of joy. Through them, we begin to understand how the mind works and prepare ourselves to face real-life situations, “says the scientist.

And he puts midwives as an example . Many often dream over and over that they have a child, even though they have never given birth. And that gives them an understanding and perception of the emotions and pain experienced in childbirth that they could not have otherwise.

Dreaming could function as a factor of social cohesion, a mechanism by which one learns to put oneself in the shoes of the other and to understand what they feel.

Perhaps this is another of the tools that evolution has endowed us with, because alone, without others, we would not have been able to get here: we would have become extinct. We are social beings, we need mutual contact. And isn’t dreaming an extremely beautiful strategy to achieve it?

Tips for better sleep

At times, the lifestyle may not promote sleep and result in not getting all the rest that would be needed.

Routines are very useful to relax and prepare the body for sleep. We collect some guidelines for sleep hygiene:

• Taking a hot bath, taking a few quiet breaths, or meditating a little can help.
• It may also be a good idea to drink, well in advance, a relaxing infusion of maría luisa, linden or passionflower.
• Caffeine and alcohol should be avoided, at least in the afternoon. Also cigarettes, since caffeine and nicotine are stimulants and inhibit sleep.
• Dinner should be light to avoid interfering with sleep. Spicy or fatty foods, which can cause burning and heavy digestion, should be avoided, as well as foods with tyramine, such as aged cheese, ham, aubergines, walnuts, soy sauce or red wine; This amino acid causes the secretion of norepinephrine, a stimulant capable of keeping you awake at night.
• Exercising regularly is highly recommended, but it should be done at least five hours before going to sleep. The best time of day to do it is in the morning, since it awakens the body and prepares it to face the day with energy.
• The environment should be as comfortable as possible, quiet, dark, with a good temperature.
• And you have to use the bed only to sleep or have relationships with your partner. Better to avoid reading, watching television or using the computer.
• When you cannot fall asleep, instead of tossing and turning, which causes anxiety and nervousness, it is better to get up, walk around the house a bit, perhaps listen to some relaxing music or read until you feel sleepy.