Why your sleep is so important

Nowadays we tend to either get more than enough sleep and wake up feeling worse than we did when we went to bed or we don't get enough and walk through our days like a zombie. We still don't know why we sleep but we know that it is the single most important part to our health. It is not new to us that it is much harder to learn or engage in much of anything when we are sleep deprived.

Melatonin

One of the most important hormones involved in our sleep is a hormone and antioxidant, melatonin. Naturally found in our bodies', melatonin's job is to regulate our night and day cycles.

Darkness causes our body to produce more melatonin and light does the opposite while signaling the body to wake up. Melatonin levels increase the most at night, usually around 9 pm, causing us to feel sleepy and making our beds much more inviting. These levels stay elevated for about 12 hours and drop again at 9 am. when we are exposed to light.

The blue light from using technology late at night can consequently trick our brains in to thinking that it is day time, throwing off our sleep cycle and giving you those nasty headaches in the forehead, This goes for keeping night lights on in our rooms while we try to sleep as well. If our bodies are not properly regulating melatonin levels there can be several serious problems affecting the rest of our bodies. It is critical when concerned with recovery from exercises and necessary in order to fight many stresses and diseases.

Learning

Sleep itself plays an important role in learning, those that are sleep deprived have a much more difficult time when dealing with three functions of the brain, acquisition, consolidation and recall. Acquisition is when the brain is exposed to new information. Consolidation refers to the process when a memory becomes set in the brain and recall is the ability to access the information we just stored. All three of these functions are drastically altered when our bodies lack rest. When our motor neurons are over worked they are no longer able to coordinate functions properly and in turn makes it difficult to access previous memories and information in the brain.

---

References