Importance Of Sleep For Health And Beauty

The importance of Sleep

After you’ve taken pains to eat all the right foods, get some exercise, and skillfully manage the stress in your life, one item still remains on your "smart-living” checklist—sleep. Sweet, refreshing, rejuvenating sleep. On the surface, it may seem as though nothing much happens while you snooze, aside from the odd dream you recall the next morning and we do not fully realize the importance of sleep.

But this is misleading. Sleep is actually a very productive period for your entire body. Children, adolescents, and teens, for instance, do most of their growing while asleep; and bed rest is routinely recommended for the sick because that is when we heal fastest. At night, the body gets the opportunity to slow down, relax, and most important, repair itself.

Not surprisingly, night time is the skin’s best chance to undo all the damage we subject it to on a daily basis. The relief comes, in part, from what sleep denies us, such as exposure to UV radiation, smog, dirt, makeup, and stress. In addition, sleep gives our facial skin (and the muscles beneath it) a well-deserved respite from serving as the mirror of our thoughts and emotions.

When we’re awake, we create wrinkles without even knowing it, just by talking, smiling, frowning, and performing the wide range of movements that make our daytime faces so animated and expressive. But when we sleep, this constant pulling, twisting, and stretching stops, thereby easing facial tension. It’s like taking off a shirt you’ve worn all day and hanging it up: the wrinkles tend to fall out.

Anti wrinkling processes also take place during the slow wave portion of the sleep cycle, commonly known as "deep sleep.” When we sleep our soundest, the body produces greater quantities of estrogen and progesterone—two hormones that help prevent the thinning of the skin that contributes to the development of wrinkles as we age.

Over the years, too many lost hours of hormone-producing sleep may leave you with skin that’s not only less youthful and vibrant but also more acne-prone than it would have been otherwise. Sun damage, too, is repaired during the hours we spend out of harm’s way.

Because a sleeping body isn’t distracted by keeping up with daytime activities like walking and chewing gum, it can devote a much more generous percentage of its energy and resources to replacing scorched epidermal cells and mending broken-down collagen and elastin fibers.

The skin possesses an almost miraculous capacity to bounce back from adversity. But to maximize these remarkable self- healing powers, you must afford your skin the luxury of some free time in the form of adequate sleep.

How Many Hours of Sleep Do You Need Nightly?

Everyone needs a different amount of sleep. Some of us can function quite well on as little as 6 hours of sleep per night, while others may require a full 8 hours or more.

The Importance Of Sleep to Teens

It’s common knowledge that teens in general tend to be heavy sleepers— and with good reason! The rapid growth and maturation that occurs during this stage of life makes getting some extra Z’s an absolute necessity, especially since our bodies typically stop growing sometime in early adulthood. As a result, the teen who shortchanges herself on sleep today creates a developmental deficit that cannot be made up later.

Erratic sleep patterns also have consequences in the here and now, such as increased irritability, memory lapses, poor concentration, and a generally haggard appearance. Conversely, research shows that people who get their fair share of sleep are usually less prone to moodiness, more productive, and better able to absorb and retain information than those who do not.