Search:

How Sleep Can Heal Your Body

By: Jamaal Harrison Years ago, sleep was understood to be a period of time during which your brain was not active. Now it is known that sleep consists of a number of distinctive stages, and that your brain is active even while you are asleep. Different brain activities occur during each different sleep stage. Sleep is an important factor in helping people to feel good and function at their full potential, as a number of things occur during this time to facilitate healthiness, healing, and rejuvination.

Furthermore, failing to get adequate amounts of sleep can be downright dangerous. Often a lack of sleep can serve to weaken the immune system, which in turn can lead to illness. The liver also seems to benefit tremendously from a good night's rest. Having a healthy liver is important because it performs hundreds of functions - over 500, to be exact - including the task of cleaning the blood and filtering harmful toxins and chemicals out of our bodies. Keeping late hours can negatively impact the metabolism of the liver.

It is said that a person requires at least eight hours of sound sleep. After a days work the body needs to rest in order to restore the damages occurred during the day. The liver itself does over 500 different specific functions one of the most important being cleaning the blood. There is lot of chemicals now in air, water and food; because of this the liver is being overburdened to clean up everything which is another function of the liver. Thus we see that liver does many different functions during the day and so there is the need for the body to shut down and sleep to repair itself. Some people sleep less than eight hours. However research done on sleep has shown that the brain needs to have at least three hours to shut down, for it to kind of reset the cycle.

But to do all the repair work, it takes a lot longer than three hours. If one is sleeping only for three hours for more than one night then the effect is as good as no sleep at all, because the body becomes tired as it has not got the chance to repair itself. One would feel like that of being hit with a ton of bricks. Here the body is screaming for help. It needs sleep so that it can rejuvenate itself. It will be saying that it didn't get the chance to kind of catch up on all the sleep the night before and they have all these other things that they needed to repair from the days before and now they have all these other things that we are making them do today. So may be the brain continues to work even if you sleep for three to four hours a day but in the long run if you're not getting, close to eight hours a night, it eventually will take a heavy toll on the brain.

The brain may function with merely three or four hours of sleep, but it will not function at its best without that eight hours we truly need. Liver function also impacts the immune system so sleep is doubly important. We must have a strong and vigorous immune system to fight invaders like viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites, so enough sleep is essential for everyone. Getting adequate sleep makes for a healthy liver and a strong and vital immune system which makes us feel better and be healthier.