Your getting sleepy, very sleepy...

One important health habit that often gets overlooked is getting enough sleep. Some surveys reveal that upwards of 60% of Americans have some sleep difficulties at least a few nights a week or more. Writing about sleep is always an interesting topic, because if it is uninteresting it might put you to sleep. So we will see if we can keep your interest just long enough to learn why getting enough sleep is so important to your health.

So why is sleep so important? Of course there is the obvious, the day after not sleeping enough you will experience moments of drowsiness and may fall asleep or have slowed performance while doing important tasks. According to the DOT (Department of Transportation) 25% of all highway crashes are due to sleepiness. It is estimated that there is around $50-100 billion in indirect costs each year due to sleepiness with decreased productivity and other related costs. But there are other physiological changes that happen when we don’t sleep enough. A research report that came out in the July issue of the journal of Sleep showed that a decrease in sleep also affects our immune system. Our immune system will react to various physical stresses (i.e. flu virus, strained muscle, etc.) that are placed on it. Lack of sleep acts as a physical stress to our bodies and thus kicks in our stress response by increasing activation of our immune system with the granulocytes. This long term increase in immune system stress response has been linked to future health problems such as: obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.

So how much sleep do you need? On average most people will require 7-8 hours of sleep, but some can do fine with as little as 6 hours and others need up to 10 hours. After a nights rest you should be able to work the next day without any bouts of sleepiness or drowsiness. If you do experience this then it would be a sign that you may not be getting enough sleep and starting to kick in your immune system a little extra as a response to the extra physical stress you’re placing upon it. If you do have difficulty sleeping you may want to consult a health professional to look at treatment for it. Often times our thought is that getting a sleeping pill is all we need. But a research article in The Archives of Internal Medicine published in October of 2004 showed that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) actually outperformed the sleeping pill. So keep that in mind when looking at treatment options.

So hopefully you were able to make it to the end of this and not fall asleep and learned why getting good rest is so important. If you did fall asleep, it may be a sign you are not getting enough sleep at night; or we need to make the article more interesting.