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Importance of Sleep
You may not consider sleep when thinking about the risk factors that play a role in your health. Things like nutrition, physical activity, weight, and tobacco may come to mind more easily. While it may not be the first risk factor you think of, sleep is essential to your health and overall well-being. It’s also essential to your survival. |  |
Think about this: if you didn’t get any sleep over an extended period of time, you would die more quickly than if you didn’t eat any food over the same period of time? Here’s why. When you don’t sleep, your body doesn’t replace the damaged cells in your tissues and organs. Over a long period of time, if enough cells weren’t being replaced, your organs would become damaged and not work properly. If your organs weren’t working properly, you would die.
SLEEP AND YOUR HEALTH
It’s unlikely you would ever go without sleep to the extreme outlined above. However, even small amounts of sleep loss can affect your health over time. For example, compared to those who sleep between seven and eight hourseach night, people who sleep between six and seven hours each night:
• Weigh more.
• Have higher triglyceride (a type of fat) levels.
• Have higher diastolic blood pressure (your blood pressure when your heart is resting) levels.
• Have lower HDL-cholesterol (good cholesterol) levels.
These differences are even larger in people who sleep between five and six hours each night. Getting enough sleep each night is important because being overweight or obese, or having high blood pressure, high triglyceride, or low HDL-cholesterol levels puts you at a greater risk of developing a chronic disease (e.g., heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes).
SLEEP AND PEAK PERFORMANCE
In addition to the amount of sleep you get each night, the length of time between periods of sleep is also important. After being awake for 17 hours (e.g., 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m.):
• Your ability to concentrate and pay attention decreases.
• Your reaction times become delayed.
• You become more forgetful.
• Your decision making skills decrease.
These effects become more severe the longer you go without sleep. They’re also more obvious in young adults than in older adults.
GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP MAKES “CENTS”
Lack of sleep has a big impact on the economy. Fatigue-related productivity losses have been shown to cost an employer about $2 000 per employee each year. Approximately 17 million Canadians over 15 years of age are employed. This means about $34 trillion dollars are lost each year due to fatigue-related productivity losses.
As you can see, getting the right amount of sleep is important. Still, about one in five adults don’t get the sleep they need (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2008). To help you sleep better, this Sleep Well newsletter tells you about what can affect your sleep, what you can do to sleep better and, in turn, be healthier.
