This is not just an American issue. A study recently conducted at the University of British Columbia on adults between the ages of 32 and 49, determined that participants who slept less than seven hours a night, were significantly more likely to be obese!
These alarming statistics concerning sleep deprivation all boil down to two hormones called ghrelin and leptin. Let's take a closer look at these two culprits.
Energy expenditure and energy intake are both regulated by leptin. It's function is to let the brain know when you've had plenty to eat.
Ghrelin's main function is to trigger hunger. Your ghrelin levels are naturally higher prior to a meal and naturally lower following a meal.
How could sleep deprivation and these two hormones be responsible for so many weight issues? When your body is deprived of needed sleep, it produces more ghrelin, which stimulates your appetite, and less leptin, which depresses your appetite! A 2004, University of Chicago study showed that individuals, who slept only four hours a night for a two-night period, had a 28% increase in ghrelin and a 28% decrease in leptin!
It's quite clear from looking at this study that sleep deprivation causes people to have appetites that are on overdrive. As if that weren't alarming enough, the same lack of sleep hinders the body's ability to recognize that it's had enough food.
Sleep deprivation puts us at an increased risk for many health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain types of cancer. Most researchers agree that the dangers are triggered when people get as little as 6-7 hours of sleep a night! These alarming hormonal changes and the resulting effect on hunger just might be the greatest jeopardy to our overall health as a result of sleep deprivation.
But now the facts are clearly out, and we realise that a lack of enough quality sleep is a prime cause of lowered metabolic rate, overweight, illness and disease.
In fact a lack of sufficient sleep is now being seen as a modern disease, creating stress, compromising the body's ability to regenerate, and even lowering our basic metabolic rate. Our metabolic rate plays a crucial role in weight loss and is every bit as important as the amount of food that we eat, and the amount of activity we have.
Have you heard the silly line from the diet companies that weight loss requires you to calculate the energy from the food you eat, and then deduct the energy from your activity output? If this advice weren't so pointless and dangerous, it'd be laughable. There is a far more important factor, and that's your resting metabolic rate.
There are many lifestyle factors that impact on metabolic rate, and sleep is one of them, so quality sleep is a crucial part of any serious weight loss program. The amount of sleep you need is unique to you, though probably it will be around 7 1/2 to 8 hours of good sleep each night. Of course kids need a lot more than that, often more like 12 or 13 hours of sleep nightly.
Quality sleep is even more essential in the journey to recover from any illness, including depression.
9 Steps to Improve Sleep
1 Protect your sleep time. Don't allow the expectations of others to detract from your sleep. If you need to go to bed early in order to get your sleep, do it. If you need to stop people from interrupting your sleep, do it.
If sleep interruption is beyond your control (for example if you have small children or a sick partner who needs care during the night) make sure you get extra sleep during the day, and also make sure you get some nights off.
2 It's important to have a regular routine for your day. This means pretty much going to bed and getting up the same time each day, and having a regular "calm down" time in the hour before bed. This trains your brain to sleep much better.
3 About the slow down time before bed. This is a time when you want to avoid stimulation, whether that's from books or television, or from alcohol for example. This is a time for dimmed lighting, quiet music, and easy conversation.
4 Remove Unacceptable Stress from Your Life. Oftentimes people find it hard to relax enough to go to sleep, or to stay asleep, because they're plagued by troublesome thoughts. There are highly-effective techniques to both remove the stress, and to deal with the thoughts. The two most commonly used are Logotherapy and NeuroStim, both of which you'll find help for on the forums at TopLifeSolutions.com.
5 Prepare Your Bedroom. Of course your bed and pillows etc should be comfortable! But in addition your room should be dark and on the cool side, with fresh air. Those are ideal sleeping conditions.
6 Don't get up once you've gone to bed except for good reason. I've heard experts tell insomniacs not to stay in bed if they can't sleep because they'll end up associating their bed with their sleeping difficulties. Really this is rather illogical because bed is already associated with lots of things apart from sleep! My own advice is to stay in bed if it's an appropriate sleep time in order to train your brain that this time of night means bed!
I claim that there's obvious and unarguable evidence for my recommendation on this point, and you'll see that for yourself immediately you think of the situation of training a baby or child into a good sleep routine. What would happen if each time the child struggled to go to sleep, you took the child out of bed and read him/her a book? Would that be a smart thing to do? No, didn't think so!
So stay in bed, and use one of many proven relaxation techniques so that if you're not sleeping, you're at least training yourself to maintain a relaxed state - you're at least "resting".
7 Be Active During the Day. A good level of physical activity is essential to good sleep.
8 Enjoy good relationships with everyone around you. If you have strained relationships, or adversarial relationships, this will detract from your sense of wellbeing and therefore will definitely impact on your sleep. Get your relationships in shape and you'll enjoy much better sleep.
9 Ensure your nutrition is adequate. Our body can produce the right hormones at the right time only if we take in the right nutrients. For example the extre low-carb diet that is being touted around the internet (and unfortunately even by some doctors who should know better!) is a recipe for lousy sleep, because it interferes with the production of melatonin. Enjoy a good, healthy diet with lots of variety and you'll increase your ability to sleep well.
Both Gail M. Davis & Christine Sutherland are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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