We all know what a great night’s sleep feels like…and what is doesn’t. The everyday unexpected curve balls that can throw a wrench into the workings of our daily existence, do a great job of affecting not just our ability to get sleep, but the quality of the sleep we finally do get, if any. We all know what it’s like to try and stop the ‘hamster wheel’ when we know we need to shut it down and get some very necessary shut eye.
Everyone has heard and read about the need for good quality sleep. The quality, quantity and duration of those precious Z’s is the subject for another time. But did you know that the simple act of sleeping, specifically the period identified as REM (rapid eye movement) sleep has an effect on our mmune system? A quote from the book, Why We Sleep written by Dr. Matthew Walker, a sleep researcher, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at UC Berkeley, explains the impact of sleep on our immune system this way, “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer” (Walker, M, PhD, (2017).
While the biologic terminology might sound like “scientific geek speak” with words like Circadian Rhythm, Cytokines, T-Cells and Interleukin-12, the idea that the body’s neuroimmunology is constantly being strengthened by the effects of sleep, is yet another remarkable example of our body’s ability to keep us healthy, alive and functioning well. Studies done on this subject have proven the importance of the connection between immune health and the need for sleep, “Over the last 15 years, research following a systems approach of neuroimmunology has accumulated surprisingly strong evidence that sleep enhances immune defense, in agreement with the popular wisdom that sleep helps healing” (Besedovsky, L., et al., (2012).
It’s also safe to say that once we finally do succumb to whatever the infectious disease is that’s ‘going around’, all we want to do is go to bed, because the body needs sleep to successfully fight the infection. This is why REM sleep is so vitally important and necessary. Because it is during this period when our immune system is fortified, reinforced and ‘restocked’ with the essential chemistry it needs to address and eliminate viral and bacterial invaders (Yale Medicine, (March, 2023).
For those of us who suffer from a sleep debt due to problems like, being a new parent, the unforgiving demands of our job or our own inability to shut the door on the social media rabbit hole, it is a daily fight we face every morning. But quality and quantity of our sleep is essential for our own health, mental and physical wellbeing. And that depends on how well we recognize how our need for sleep can keep us healthy and why it’s necessary for the requirements of a successfully functioning day-to-day.
References
Walker, M., PhD., Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, (October, 2017), Scribner, ISBN 9781501144332
Besedovsky, L., Lange, T., Born, J. (2012), Sleep and immune function. Pflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology, 463(1), 121–137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00424-011-1044-0 Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3256323/
Staff writer, Yale Medicine, (March, 2023), How Sleep Affects Your Immune System, Yale Medicine. Retrieved from https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-sleep-affects-immunity