Sleep is a Biological Necessity
Your physiological functions are dependent on a consistent sleep-wake cycle and affected by conflict when circadian rhythm and your sleep-wake cycle are out of sync. Therefore, sufficient and efficient sleep results in a healthy sleep which in turn is a determinant of good health. Lack of sleep impacts your metabolism which results in less energy. Energy powers everything you do from moving to thinking to growing. That means that sleep is vital for sustaining your body's physicality and cognitive abilities.
Your body houses a complex system of physiological functions that keep you alive:
- Every cell in your body has its own job to do.
- Virtually every cell, tissue, and organ in your body has its own innate timing device or circadian rhythm.
- Circadian rhythm follows a pattern of a nearly 24-hour cycle, a light/dark cycle that is determined by the earth's 24-hour solar rotation.
- All physiological functions in your body are governed by circadian rhythm.
- One of these functions is sleep pattern.
- The hormone melatonin is largely responsible for regulating your sleep and wakefulness on a daily basis as well as seasonally. Melatonin is produced in your pineal gland. The production of melatonin is synchronized to your circadian rhythm. Its rate of production is dictated by natural light. At night, the master pacemaker alerts the brain to make more melatonin so you get drowsy. With the coming of daylight, melatonin production ebbs.
- All physiological functions in your body are interconnected.
- Physiological functions are dependent on your having a consistent sleep-wake cycle and are affected by conflict when circadian rhythm and your sleep-wake cycle are out of sync.
- Most of the predictable changes in your human body are governed by cycles of chemical signals and hormonal activity that are reacting to environmental inputs such as light, feeding, and temperature.
- A self-sustained primary master clock in your brain is the internal pacemaker that regulates all circadian rhythms to keep them in sync throughout a twenty-four hour period of the planet's rotation around the sun.
- In that time your body is either preparing for and sustaining these processes: oxygen consumption, cardiovascular activation, cell repair and regeneration, core body temperature, renal filtration, digestion, brain wave activity, hormone production, nutrient mobilization, all the metabolic reactions, all the activity of endocrine glands, and any other physiological process critical to maintaining your life.
- Sleep is the only time in which your brain is able to wash away the build-up of the toxic by-products of cell metabolism, the waste protein that has accumulated over the day and can build up and cause dementia.
- Sleep is the only time that your brain can organize everything you have learned and experienced.
- When sleep pressure and circadian rhythm reinforce each other, the result is healthy sleep which helps maintain your healthy mind and body.
- If you have no sleep, or insufficient sleep, these critical processes are not able to do their work effectively.
- Eventually, depriving yourself of sleep results in a decline in your sleep health, which can adversely affect your physical and mental well-being. Mild symptoms, signalling poor health or mental awareness, can progress to serious and life-threatening physical and mental conditions for you.
- Disruption of the circadian rhythm has been linked to various sleep disorders, such as insomnia. Abnormal circadian rhythms have also been associated with obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder.
