During the day, our body has to be able to react on various facts and situations. Changing professional and social situations, different physical activities and demands, hunger or eating, necessary immune response – often, the reactions have to happen at once and without thinking.
It is important that our body is ably to save the experiences to quickly carry out the necessary adaptions. Not only motoric, cognitive and executive skills are saved during sleep, sleep is also essential for the “memory formation of the organs” as Jan Born, scientist at the Medical University Luebeck, Germany, quotes.
During sleep, the stress load of our endogenous systems is reduced to a minimum. Only this enables our body to process all experiences. The more stress- and disturbance-free your sleep surrounding is, the better your sleeping underlay allows relaxation resp. supports your body the easier your body is able to perform the necessary “saving-processes”.
In a study, Jan Born and his team found proof that when comparing test persons with sufficient sleep to persons with few sleep the second group formed less antibodies and the metabolism suffered an imbalance. Born: “The blood sugar level of the participants with only four hours of sleep per day could not be stabilized sufficiently, the insulin resistance, the blood pressure as well as the level of the stress hormone cortisol were increased.”
Opponent cortisol
Every kind of stress releases cortisol to our body. But, when the cortisol level is too high, not only falling asleep and sleeping through become difficult but also the memory formation is affected by that. Out of this reason, it is also important to reduce the stress level built up during the day by relaxing, comfortable activities and exercises.
This post is also available in / Diesen Beitrag gibt es auch in: German
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