Have you been getting your recommended sleep? It can seem like an easy place to cut away hours when we’re busy, we’re all guilty of it, but the truth is sleep is integral to our overall functioning. Life, simply put, starts to feel much harder when we’re sleep deprived.
Mentally, sleep fuels our brains. If you’ve ever had a morning or day where you feel like your brain is slow—making decisions is more exhausting, you’re forgetting details and items, or you’re more emotional or irritable than normal, then there’s a good chance you’re experiencing ‘brain fog’. It’s a term to encompass a range of cognitive symptoms that, when felt, can inhibit our daily life.
Sleeping allows your brain to set itself up for the next day as it forms new pathways and helps to process and store information. Having mood swings, feeling angry and impulsive, lacking motivation—all can be attributed to a lack of sleep. On a larger scale, sleep deprivation has been linked to depression and risk-taking behavior.
When you add in the physical implications of sleep deprivation, it becomes even more evident how important getting those hours is. On a physical level, sleep is integral for our health. Lack of proper sleep affects our hunger cues and insulin levels. Sleeping supports healing and repair for your heart and blood vessels as well as building resilience for fighting off germs and sickness. To top it all off, sleep decreases risk for a wide range of health problems including heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and more.
When we’re considering our holistic health, it’s integral to truly consider all aspects that contribute, and our sleep is an incredibly important piece to our self-care puzzle. If you’re struggling to get those hours, it might be time to investigate what’s making it difficult. Sometimes it’s due to our racing thoughts while other times it’s because we’re buzzing from over-caffeination or, believe it or not, over-exhaustion. Our sleep is integral! Check in on your sleep hygiene, especially if life is feeling a little more difficult as of late—you are deserving of solid, restorative rest. Maybe more importantly, you need it.
Written by: Annie Lindenberg, MFA Creative Writing, Menari Blogger