5. Sleep helps with weight management
Time and again, people struggle with weight issues. They claim to have tried everything – follow a restrictive diet, eat healthily, and exercise regularly.
But apparently, getting your ideal weight requires more than that. Aside from eating healthy, dieting, and exercising, the importance of rest and sleep should not be overlooked. You need it in achieving your ideal weight.
Shape.com explains why it is very important to get enough sleep if you want to lose weight:
“Within just four days of sleep deprivation, your body’s ability to properly use insulin (the master storage hormone) becomes completely disrupted. In fact, the University of Chicago researchers found that insulin sensitivity dropped by more than 30 percent.
“Here’s why that’s bad: When your insulin is functioning well, fat cells remove fatty acids and lipids from your bloodstream and prevent storage. When you become more insulin resistant, fats (lipids) circulate in your blood and pump out more insulin”
“Eventually, this excess insulin ends up storing fat in all the wrong places, such as tissues like your liver. And this is exactly how you become fat and suffer from diseases like diabetes.”
6. Sleep helps you stay mentally and emotionally fit
Another importance of rest and sleep is that it affects your mental and emotional health. Having a healthy mental and emotional health depends largely on how well you sleep. And most people would attest to this.
In fact, when people don’t get enough sleep, they tend to get moody and entertain negativity. A sleepy baby is usually very cranky and irritable – same goes for grown-ups.
Harvard Health has a more detailed explanation of how this goes:
“The brain basis of a mutual relationship between sleep and mental health is not yet completely understood. But neuroimaging and neurochemistry studies suggest that a good night’s sleep helps foster both mental and emotional resilience. On the other hand, chronic sleep disruptions set the stage for negative thinking and emotional vulnerability.”