The greatest remedy for being tired is sleep. During this period of rest, the body repairs, reenergizes itself, and prepares itself for renewed activity. Other than food, air, and water, sleep is equally important. We spend about one-third of our lives in sleep. It is unfortunate that people rarely give importance to sleep; some even think it is merely a waste of time or inactivity to the body. What we need to realize is when we are active we are expending energy and when we rest/sleep, we are rebuilding our energy reserves. In simple words, our body is recharged at night. Sleep is a partial shutdown for recharging, there is a lot happening in the body during sleep. Repair of tissues, healing, replacing old cells with new ones.
If you try avoiding sleep for several hours, the human body gets its desired sleep when it needs it. The body must have it or else it will perish without sleep. It is not only the hours of sleep, but also the quality of sleep that is important, i.e., how sound is the sleep. Due to various reasons, a stressful day at work, troubling thoughts of events during the day, etc., the sleep at night may be inadequate. As a result, the following entire day you tend to be drowsy and dull, which in turn affects health and productivity. In today’s hustle and bustle of workaholism and efforts to succeed, the body’s biological needs are many a times sacrificed. With an increasing trend of such workload situations/stress/unhealthy lifestyles and competition, sleep is compromised and thus insomnia has become a common affair among a large fraction of the society. It is distressing that many of the sleep deprived people resort to drugs (sleeping pills, tranquilizers, alcohol). Such solutions make the problem worse over a longer period. A wiser thing would be to look for the underlying cause rather than look for temporary methods to induce sleep.
There are no fixed hours of sleep for everyone. Different conditions require different lengths of sleep. Some people do fine even with 4 hours, some may need 10 hours. If the conditions at sleeping time are good, the sleep quality will be best. It is better to maintain a good atmosphere/hygiene for sleep.
- Fresh air as compared to stale air induces good quality sleep.
- Eating a meal just before sleeping disturbs sleep as the energy required for re energizing the nerves is directed towards digestion. Eat a few hours prior to sleeping.
- Exercise helps in oxygenation of blood and eliminating toxins; this in turn helps the body to recuperate better during sleep as the system has less to do in terms of removal of waste at night.
- A healthy and wholesome diet requires less digestive energy; this will make an individual less toxic and the sleep is automatically of better quality.
- A stable and comfortable bedding and an appropriate neck support enhances quality of sleep.
- Less stressed and positive people quickly fall off to sleep rather than a person whose mind is constantly bombarded with thoughts.
In the schedule of a healthy life style, sleep has invaluable contribution.