Mark Gottschlich stresses the importance of sleep in daily life.
There are very few things today that we can unanimously agree upon, but one of those is undoubtedly that we all love a good night’s sleep. Yet many of us admit to a lack of sufficient sleep on the majority of nights in a given week.
The reasons for inadequate daily sleep vary, but at its core, the problem is that we have devalued sleep. We often disregard internal cues of exhaustion. We flood our systems with caffeine and sugar throughout the day and when we can finally no longer mask our body’s need for sleep, we hop in bed and turn on the TV or pull out our cell phones in an attempt to wind down. These behaviors only exacerbate the problem.
While it is readily apparent that sleep is critical to mood and helps prevent grumpy outbursts, the bigger concern is chronic sleep insufficiency, which can contribute to health problems such as weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and a decrease in the immune system’s power. Rest allows your body the time necessary to cleanse its metabolic waste products and maintain your body’s chemical integrity, while also consolidating short-term memories into long-term memories via chemical and structural growth within the brain. So in a way, we can be likened to our cell phones. We must allocate time to recharge our “metabolic batteries” and to ensure our “memory drive software updates” have been completed. We wouldn’t expect our phones to function properly without a charged battery and their software updated, so we certainly shouldn’t expect our brains and complex bodies to be able to function without the necessary sleep.
While it is great to understand sleep’s relevance to health, this knowledge is of little practicality if you are practicing poor sleep hygiene and having difficulty sleeping. So for those of you that have trouble sleeping, try following these basic principles: maintain a regular sleep/wake schedule (always a difficult task for a college student), exercise regularly and avoid caffeine found in coffee, tea, soda and some pain relievers six hours before bedtime (caffeine’s half-life is roughly six hours).
Sleep is too important to shortchange. Give yourself the same respect you give your cell phone because while others may suffer and be turned off by your cantankerous sleep deprived mood, it is really your health that is suffering the most. Similar to the saying “happy wife, happy life,” I encourage you to live by my saying “a snoring sleeper is a keeper.”
Mark Gottschlich is a second year medical student at the Ohio University Heritage College of Medicine and a monthly columnist at The Post. Have questions about health and wellness? Email him at gg617012@ohio.edu; call your physician if you feel excessively tired throughout the day.
