MOOD, CLARITY & ENERGY LEVELS When you sleep well, you restore the body and your mental processes integrate, and this will help you with improved energy levels, plus it will positively affect your mood. Quality sleep will promote all the biological integration processes so that you can feel balanced overall and experience clarity of mind. Good sleep means that your mental function is improved, for example, memory consolidation is optimised during good sleep. You’re updating new neurological connections that have been made during the day. While you sleep, there’s major restructuring going on, which means that later in the day, you will be able to respond quickly and have more clarity and the learning has been integrated. This is because, with good sleep, you will integrate new knowledge and enjoy increased performance both mentally and physically. CARDIAC HEALTH & DIABETES Getting good sleep affects cardiac health positively because it slows down your heart rate, and blood pressure decreases. It also ensures that your blood sugar levels are regulated, which is important if you want to avoid being a diabetic. Healthy sleep means that insulin regulation can occur more easily. IMMUNE FUNCTION Good sleep also helps to benefit your immune system. Cytokines are a category of small proteins, important in cell signalling. Cytokines are produced during sleep, which will support a healthy immune system. Disorganization or loss of sleep interferes with the diurnal patterns of cytokine immune-neuroendocrine functions, thereby limiting the power of your immune system capacity. HUMAN GROWTH HORMONE – the longevity & beauty hormone A restorative night’s sleep is so powerful because all the systems are repaired, one mechanism being the release of growth hormone, which assists with the repair of tissues and muscles. Around 75% of human growth hormone (hGH) is produced during sleep. In healthy adults, it is typically created during the first period of Stage 3 sleep, also known as a deep or slow wave sleep. During this stage, hGH works to repair and restore your body and muscles from the stress they suffered the previous day. Sleep deprivation means that there is less slow-wave sleep, which leads to less hGH production. When a person experiences a lack of sleep, the body will try and make up for it by producing more hGH the next time this person sleeps, which can disrupt circadian rhythms and the normal hGH cycle. Did you know that we get more Stage 3 sleep during the first part of the night, so people who are working night shifts, or those who tend to stay up late are more at risk of disrupted hGH secretion? WEIGHT REGULATION When you are getting good enough sleep, you can feel that you can manage your intake of food. This is because of two hormones called leptin and ghrelin. Leptin and gherlin help to regulate hunger and they are affected by sleep. Ghrelin is a hormone that stimulates appetite and leptin decrease it. When anyone is sleep-deprived, the levels of ghrelin spike and the level of leptin falls, which leads to an increase in hunger. In other words, when you sleep in an optimised way, you suppress the secretion of lectins. And as these are reducing the production of the appetite stimulant ghrelin, this explains why you get more munchies and crave more foods when you have less sleep, and why you can control your food intake much more when you get healthy sleep. STRESS MANAGEMENT & ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE Good sleep helps you with stress relief. When you sleep well, you wake up feeling refreshed and you can manage any stress so much better, rather than feeling tense and anxious as you arise, or quickly even with small triggers (that usually wouldn’t affect you). During sleep, we process our experiences from the day and assimilate the learnings from the day, plus we often see things from a more integrated perspective. When we wake up after a good sleep, there’s no (or much less) leftover from the day(s) before, and we can step into our day with greater clarity, patience, and ease. Good sleep also helps with athletic/physical performance overall because physical recovery is occurring on many levels while we sleep so that the body can function at its highest. Again, human growth hormone is involved and secreted during good sleep. This will then help you to be in good shape and increase your performance, plus help reduce the possibility of injuries or accidents.