There is a direct correlation between the amount of sleep a person gets and the tendency to engage in dysfunctional thinking. You don’t have to be a therapist to know that sleep loss affects your judgment; it greatly affects your perception, even just a little bit of sleep loss.
There is very compelling research showing that insomnia, a year of off and on poor sleep is the single, strongest predictive fact in clinical depression. We know that there is a profound connection between chronic sleep loss and our physical health. Short sleepers, people who sleep an average of five or six hours or less per night, have a 50% increased risk for viral infection. This is probably true for other kinds of infection too because short sleeping has a profound impact on our overall immune function.
Research shows a very strong correlation now between insufficient sleep and increases in cardiovascular disease. Along with increases of stroke, high blood pressure, and heart attack. There is a strong link between diabetes and metabolic disorders in general and being a short sleeper. The American Cancer Society did a study of a million American adults and found a correlation between being a short sleeper and increases in cancers across the board. So that the big picture is that sleep is fundamental to health, along with exercise, nutrition and stress management.
A natural & effective addition to your night time routine:
Melatonin ~ research that suggests that the pineal gland, which produces melatonin becomes less and less efficient over time, caused by the overexposure to light at night. Light incidentally shuts down melatonin production in the brain.
Melatonin is a fascinating, a very old primordial molecule. What we found in melatonin in fact will delay the onset of perimenopause. Melatonin has been found useful in lowering blood pressure in men. It’s been used to treat macular degeneration. It’s been used to treat migraines. It’s been used to treat depression and the reason it has this wide spread application is because it essentially is the queen of our nighttime neurobiology.
When the body understands that it is night out, actually serotonin levels drop. Serotonin is actually converted to melatonin at night and melatonin essentially takes over so it makes sense that it has these profound sort of far reaching effects. With regard to sleep, we have really good data substantiating data showing that low doses, physiological doses of melatonin can help with sleep onset and maintaining sleep through the night.
There is a profound connection between immunity and sleep. As it kicks in at night, particularly during deep sleep. So when we see compromises in deep stages of sleep, we sincerely compromise immunity.
If the immune system gets out of whack, we see increases in a range of inflammatory markers.
Insomnia can be the result of worry, fears, anxiety, and badly functioning brain wave patterns.