Is Sleep Vital to Your Health?

Is sleep vital to your health? The short answer is absolutely yes!

I have come across several articles recently talking about studies that have indicated how important it is to get enough quality sleep every night. Here are a few:

From Physician’s Briefing – CHEST: Sleep Deprivation Tied to Obesity in Male Teens. This shows that sleeping less than 8 hours a night on weekdays can contribute to obesity in teen boys.

From the Wall Street Journal – Teens, Too, Need Help With Sleep. You need a subscription to read the whole article but the preview says enough. Studies are beginning to show that sleep deprivation can lead to risky health behaviors in high school students. Those “risky behaviors” can include drinking, smoking, and suicide.

In The Telegraph – Healthy Sleeping Habit Could Cut Obese Teens’ Diabetes Risk. It says that sleeping between seven and a half and eight and a half hours at night kept insulin and blood sugar at the optimum level.

I like PubMed, the website for the National Institutes of Health. To Sleep, To Strive, Or Both: How Best to Optimize Memory. Here is a study that was done to see which had a bigger effect on memory, sleep or monetary reward. Sleep won.

Another one on PubMed – Sleep Optimizes Motor Skill in Older Adults. People, old and young, were taught a motor skill. They did better on the skill 24 hours later after a night’s sleep than when retested only 12 hours later before having a chance to sleep. Our brains process information while we sleep to aid our learning.

I’m going to stop there. There are plenty more articles and studies and I used some for another post about sleep and teens and one on sleep and fibromyalgia that I wrote recently. From the articles and studies mentioned you can see that there are significant health, behavior, and memory benefits to a great night’s sleep. We don’t always have the ability to control how much sleep we can get, especially during the week when we have to be up in the morning to get to work or, in the case of kids, to get to school. I believe that we can have an effect on our quality of sleep though.

To make sure that my family gets the best quality sleep we can get, we all have a magnetic sleep system on our beds. By a “sleep system” I mean a magnetic mattress pad, a comforter with magnetic and far-infrared technologies, and a magnetic pillow. I can’t say that this will work the same for everyone, but we get to maximize the amount of sleep we get because the magnets and far-infrared help us to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep through the night.

If you want to check it out, the magnetic sleep system that we use is here.

Wayne Woodworth