The Benefits Of An Extra Hour of Sleep

According to BBC’s Michael Mosley, increasing the time you spend snoozing by an hour, you can upgrade your sleep quality, which in turn upgrades the quality of your day in at least three ways. Here’s what we learned from his report shared by Fast Company:

• You’ll save more memories: In the deep sleep stage, our active brains are working overtime. One of the main things that the brain is doing is transferring short-term storage into long-term storage, allowing more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don’t get a sufficient amount of deep sleep you could lose some memories.
• You’ll experience true relaxation: When you enter into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, your body is paralyzed and your eyes dart back and forth, as your brain does a little bit of chemical hygiene. It shuts off the release of noradrenalin, one of the “fight-or-flight” chemicals released to deal with stressful situation. This is the only time, day or time, where that shut off takes place. It helps us keep calm as we reprocess our experiences during sleep, making us less anxious when we wake up in the morning.
• Your gene will be happy: In a study at Surrey University in the U.K, volunteers were asked to change their swap sleep schedules. If they regularly slept 6.5 hours a night, they switched to 7.5 hours; if they regularly slept 7.5 hours, they switched to 6.5. The results showed that about 500 genes were affected by this seemingly small adjustment. For the participants who cut back and hour of sleep, genes associated with inflammation, immune response, and response to stress became more active. Also, genes associated with diabetes and cancer, increased activity. For the participants who added an hour of sleep, the reverse happened.

Be determined to get more sleep and improve your life. 7-9 hours of refreshing snooze each night will help you reach your goals, stay healthy and improve your relationships!