It is recommended by medical experts like the wonderful Margaret Salmon MD that we should all be getting between 7-9 hours of high quality sleep each night. High quality sleep is the key point here as many do get 7 -9 hours of sleep each night, but it is sleep which is interrupted and therefore we don’t feel the full benefits. Margaret is my own doctor and I spoke with her about my constant battle with tiredness last year. I felt that I was getting enough sleep but still felt tired during the day, and this was because of the quality of sleep which I was getting. If your sleep routine isn’t as good as it should be then these are the negative effects which it is going to have on your life.
Lacking Energy
The issue which I spoke to Margaret about was that i just never had much energy, I would wake up feeling pretty lousy and then as the afternoon wore on I would continue to feel a lack of spark. Naturally this meant that I wasn’t at my best when I needed to be, and I didn’t like that feeling at all. Since I have been sleeping better I find that I wake up with a real burst of energy and whilst I don’t stay high energy all day, I never get that drowsy feeling mid-afternoon that I used to.
Weight Loss
Because of the incredible work which your body does as you sleep such as burning fat and repairing cell damage, any weight loss routine is massively supported by a solid sleep pattern. No matter how your diet is going or your gym workout, if you are not receiving enough high quality sleep then you simply aren’t going to shift the amount of weight which you are trying to.
Stress Levels
When you don’t get enough sleep your brain doesn’t have time to perform the reset and the data crunching that it needs. The result of that is not just tiredness but much less patience than you may normally have. That grumpy feeling you get when you’ve had a poor night’s sleep is a result of this and it can wreak havoc on your ability to deal with stress. Finding situations massively stressful when they don’t need to be is a direct impact of not getting high quality sleep.
Concentration
For the same reasons as mentioned above, your brain will not be able to perform at 100% after poor sleep and you can feel scatty and have a serious inability to focus and concentrate. This is not a good feeling and it will affect all aspects of your personal and work life. We need our brains to be at their best at all times and the best way that you can ensure this is to get that high quality sleep which doctors like Margaret continue to tell us about.
The better the sleep, the higher your performance levels will be.
