Sleep For Life

Insufficient sleep produces :

Strokes.
Heart attacks.
Rapid ageing.
Dementia, Parkinsons and Alzheimers.
Reduction in Testosterone levels.
Cancer, particularly prostate, breast and bowl.
Impaired cognition and ability to work, think and drive safely.
A general reduction in human physiological and mental growth and development.

Sufficient sleep is essential to sound memory creation.

Insufficient sleep hampers the creation of new memories. The brain seems to reject requests for permanent storage to new memories when a lack of sleep limits resources somehow.

A lack of sleep also results in an excess of a protein call beta amyloid, which inhibits the chemical exchange of information between synapses, which is the means by which neurons communicate. This essentially destroys the connections between the branches of memory trees and manifests as Alzheimers disease.

The detoxification process which normally eliminates excess beta amyloid and a myriad of other undesirable substances is initiated during a latter phase of the sleep cycle and is omitted when sleep duration is inadequate.

Testosterone levels in men who sleep from five to six hours per night are equivalent to that of men a decade older, effectively aging them in terms of virility.

Natural killer cells, which are essential cancer fighting immune cells, are reduced by 70% in just one night of sleeping less than 5 hours. Risk of prostate, breast and bowl cancer are particularly high in these circumstances.

The National Cancer Association has in fact classified night-shift work as carcinogenic.

The impact of a lack of sufficient sleep on cardiovascular systems is also of great concern as the lowering of heart rate and blood pressure during deep sleep provide essential rest for the cardiovascular system. Failure to provide this rest results in a 200% increased risk of fatal heart attack or stroke.

One impressive source of information on the impact of sleep in this regard is provided by the daylight saving switch in spring, the day after which, manifests a 24% increase in heart attacks among the 1.6 billion affected people.

After more than 16 hours of wakedness, human body function begins to fail and requires urgent recuperative rest. After 19 to 20 hours it is comparable to a legally inebriated body and mind.

Wakefulness is essentially low-level brain damage.

I have always prided myself on needing no more than six hours of sleep. In fact sleeping for longer produces negative symptoms which have convinced me that it is bad for me but I now realize that this situation is precipitated by other factors and is forcing me to sleep less than I need to.

Man is certainly inclined to be gung-ho about such things no matter what evidence is provided and it seems rather stupid to ignore a matter which such cutting edge science claims will protect us from this horrendous array of dire conditions.

Attribution : Mathew Walker. Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the book : "Why we Sleep"

Pixabay, Unsplash, Google Images.