Can Sleep Help You to Be Healthy, Wealthy and Wise?

Remember the old saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin? “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

We can safely assume that this old adage applies equally to women as well as men!

The truth of the matter is that you won’t get any secrets of being healthy, wealthy and wise in this article that are guaranteed to work miracles. But, you will get some good information about the value of sleep and why it is so vitally important to your health and overall wellness---physical, mental, emotional and financial.
So, Can Sleep Really Help You to Be Healthy, Wealthy and Wise?

Yes, it can. While it isn’t a magical cure-all or ticket to fame and fortune, there is no doubt that getting a proper amount of healthy, restful sleep is necessary for you to function at an optimal level.

There has been a ton of scientific research on the subject of sleep.

Studies have been conducted, tests have been run, data has been collected. The final word on sleep is that we need a certain amount of it or everything ceases to function properly and just sort of goes haywire!

Sleep, and/or the lack of it, plays a critical role in every system in your body.
It has been conclusively established that sleep influences:

Immune Function
Metabolism
Memory
Learning
Longevity
And More

To understand the role that sleep plays in the workings of your body, think of it as a need; just as hunger is a need or air to breathe is a need. You were born with a built-in clock that tells you to feel sleepy after a certain amount of hours. That clock is there to address your body’s need for sleep and make sure it gets it.

When you ignore that inner clock and deprive your body of the sleep it needs; there are all sorts of dire repercussions. For example, scientific studies of animals have shown that when they’re deprived of sleep they lose their immune function entirely and die within weeks.

Further findings have shown that many of the main restorative functions in your body occur mostly---or only---during sleep. These include:

?   Muscle growth
?   Tissue repair
?   Protein synthesis
?   Growth hormone release

Starting to see why sleep is so important to your health?

Besides the physical functions influenced or even governed by sleep, it also affects your mental processes, specifically your cognitive brain functions. Every minute you’re awake, certain neurons in your brain are producing a by- product of cell activity called adenosine.

While you’re awake, the adenosine keeps building and ultimately leads to a feeling of sleepiness and being tired. It’s interesting to note that caffeine blocks the effects of adenosine in your brain and helps you to stay alert. For a while, anyway. As anybody who has ever worked the “graveyard” shift can attest; you reach a point in sleepiness when even an IV drip of coffee running continuously wouldn’t keep you feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed.

When you sleep, the level of accumulated adenosine in your brain goes down, and you wake feeling refreshed.

Brain plasticity is another emerging factor based on studies and research of sleep. It has become increasingly clear that sleep is correlated to changes in the brain regarding organization and structure, and that this brain plasticity plays a key role in the brain development of infants and children, as well as people of any age.

Think about it: isn’t it harder to concentrate and think straight when you haven’t had enough sleep?

Lack of sleep affects your judgment and perception, too!

Along with the adverse effects of lack of sleep noted above, it is also believed to be instrumental in causing poor health and contributing to conditions such as:

Diabetes
Heart Disease
High Blood Pressure
Obesity
Mood Disorders
Alcoholism
And More

Lack of sleep can make you more prone to disease by compromising your immune system, more subject to health conditions, mood disorders such as depression and have a direct effect on your ability to think and function at your best.

Obviously, these things could all have a deleterious effect on your health and wellness, as well as your ability to earn a living.

So, in summary, it’s easy to see that while being early to bed and early to rise might not automatically make you healthy, wealthy and wise---it will definitely give you a better chance at those things!