How sleep boosts your energy
Sleep is essential for the body to recover, repair, and function at its best. Understanding sleep cycles can help you improve your sleep hygiene and wake up feeling truly refreshed.
We may think of sleep as simply not being awake. But scientists divide sleep into two major types: REM (rapid eye movement) sleep or dreaming sleep, and non-REM or quiet sleep. Surprisingly, they are as different from each other as each one is from waking — yet both may be important for energy.
Non-REM sleep involves three stages: light sleep, deeper sleep, and deep sleep. Sleep specialists believe that the last stage, known as deep sleep or slow-wave sleep, is the main time when your body renews and repairs itself. This stage of sleep appears to be the one that plays the greatest role in energy, enhancing your ability to make ATP, the body's energy molecule.
In deep sleep, blood flow is directed less toward your brain, which cools measurably. At the beginning of this stage, the pituitary gland releases a pulse of growth hormone that stimulates tissue growth and muscle repair. Researchers have also detected increased blood levels of substances that activate your immune system, raising the possibility that deep sleep helps prepare the body to defend itself against infection.
Someone whose deep sleep is restricted will wake up feeling less refreshed than a person who got adequate deep sleep. When a sleep-deprived person gets some sleep, he or she will pass quickly through the lighter sleep stages into the deeper stages and spend a greater proportion of time there, suggesting that deep sleep fills an essential role in a person's optimal functioning.
REM sleep helps restore your mind, perhaps in part by helping clear out irrelevant information. Studies of students' ability to solve a complex puzzle involving abstract shapes suggest that the brain processes information overnight. Students who got a good night's sleep after seeing the puzzle fared much better at solving it compared to those asked to solve the puzzle immediately.
Other studies, from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere, have found that REM sleep facilitates learning and memory. People who were tested on how well they had learned a new task improved their scores after a night's sleep. If they were prevented from having REM sleep, the improvements were lost.
For more information on the many things you can do to increase your natural energy, order our Special Health Report, Boosting Your Energy.
Image: © blackCAT | GettyImages
Disclaimer:
As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles.
No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
