There are so many benefits to sleeping including stress relief, immunity, making your heart healthier and a lot more. Sleep is one of the essential things humans need to survive, after only 2-3 days without sleep you can already start hallucinating things. The longest stent recorded of anyone going without sleep is 19 days. Sleep is just as important if not more important than exercise and diet. Sleeping improves a lot of things like memory, reaction speed, performance levels, thinking more clearly.
There are five stages of sleep, the first being drowsiness. Drowsiness occurs when you aren’t sleeping, but you are slowly getting closer. The next is light sleep where you just fell asleep, your body temperature slowly drops, and your heart rate starts to decrease. This sets you up for stage three, moderate sleep. Moderate sleep is a stage where everything is still slowing down more so you can achieve deep sleep. Deep sleep slows your body even more preparing it for REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. This name comes from peoples eyes rapidly moving while in REM sleep. When you’re in REM sleep your brain is as active as when you’re awake during the day! During REM sleep this is when you will start having dreams, and when your body recovers the most, it also makes up 25% of your sleep.
Having longer amounts of sleep will give you a longer amount of REM sleep, so more energy the next day, more recovery in your body, and improved memory. The amount of sleep you should get depends on your age. Newborn children should be getting 14-17 hours of sleep, where as toddlers or young children should be getting 10-13 hours. Older kids should get 9-12 hours, teenagers 8-10 hours, then adults 7 – 10 hours. Anyone of much older sleep should have around 7-9 hours of sleep. If you start getting the right amount of sleep you will start to see the results the next day.
For athletes sleeping longer means better accuracy, better reaction time, and less chance of injury or sickness. A Stanford study for men’s basketball players had the players sleep for 10 hours. Then they had the players run half court and full court all of the times increased. Following that they had the players shoot free throws and threes. The entire team had nearly a 9% increase in both threes and free throws. In conclusion sleep is very important for performance and overall health.
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