The many components of good health - huh?

Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout your life. The way you feel while you are awake depends in part on what happens while you are sleeping.

Take my word for it - it can make you cranky.

During sleep, your body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain your physical health.

In children and teens, sleep also helps support growth and development. Getting inadequate sleep over time can raise your risk for chronic (long-term) health problems. It can also affect how well you think, react, work, learn, and get along with others. Learn how sleep affects your heart and circulatory system, metabolism , respiratory system, and immune system and how much sleep is enough.

When you fall asleep and enter non-REM sleep, your blood pressure and heart rate fall. During sleep, your parasympathetic system controls your body, and your heart does not work as hard as it does when you are awake. During REM sleep and when waking, your sympathetic system is activated, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to the usual levels when you are awake and relaxed. A sharp increase in blood pressure and heart rate upon waking has been linked to angina, or chest pain, and heart attacks.

Why am I tackling this topic? Because I am suffering from a lack of good sleep. Sure, I can take naps during the day but this does not allow me that special part of sleep that really makes the difference. The past several nights especially have been brutal for trying to get sleep.  

People who do not sleep enough or wake up often during the night may have a higher risk of: 

Coronary heart disease

High blood pressure

Obesity

Stroke

Now that's scary. So this is why I am focusing some attention towards sleep. Health.

Hormones and sleep

Your body makes different hormones  at different times of day. This may be related to your sleep pattern or your circadian clocks. In the morning, your body releases hormones that promote alertness, such as cortisol, which helps you wake up. Other hormones have 24-hour patterns that vary throughout your life; for example, in children, the hormones that tell the glands to release testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone are made in pulses at night, and the pulses get bigger as puberty approaches. 

Metabolism and sleep

The way your body handles fat varies according to various circadian clocks, including those in the liver, fat, and muscle. For example, the circadian clocks make sure that your liver is prepared to help digest fats at appropriate times. Your body may handle fat differently if you eat at unusual times. 

Studies have shown that not getting enough quality sleep can lead to: 

Higher levels of the hormones that control hunger, including leptin and ghrelin, inside your body

Decreased ability to respond to insulin

Increased consumption of food, especially fatty, sweet, and salty foods

Decreased physical activity

Metabolic syndrome

All of these contribute to overweight and obesity. 

Respiratory and immune systems

During sleep, you breathe less often and less deeply and take in less oxygen. These changes can cause problems in people who have health problems such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Asthma symptoms are usually worse during early morning sleep. Likewise, breathing problems in people who have lung diseases such as COPD can become worse during sleep. 

Sleep also affects different parts of your immune system, which become more active at different times of day. For example, when you sleep, a particular type of immune cell works harder. That is why people who do not sleep enough may be more likely to get colds and other infections.

I need to seriously work on a solution (or more than one) to this issue.

Even though I am able to function fairly well in spite of this I cannot help but think to myself how much better I would function with more sleep achieved all at once. ?? I do not suffer from insomnia so I am grateful for that.

On a positive note --- here's a cute joke for you:

A Mexican magician says he will disappear on the count of 3. He says "uno, dos..." poof. He disappeared without a tres.

LOL