How Your Immune System Benefits From A Good Night’s Sleep

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Sleep benefits immune system

It’s important to get sufficient amount of sleep for various reasons. The amount of sleep you get can affect your weight and stress levels. Additionally, it can greatly impact the functioning of your immune system.

If you consistently get less sleep, you might find yourself getting sick more often and taking longer to fully recover. When you go to sleep, your body isn’t doing nothing. It’s actually quite active during rest, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes maintenance that’s very important for you to stay healthy.

Your body produces important proteins to equip immune cells

There’s one important thing your body does while you’re asleep. It produces and utilizes something known as cytokines. These are relatively small proteins which assist other immune system cells in doing their jobs. However, your body produces them while you’re asleep.

If you’re not getting enough sleep, then your body will be short on cytokines. This will poorly equip your immune system to take on illness. Another part of your immune system that’s affected by sleep is the effectiveness of your white blood cells.

Your body produces hormones that’ll help white blood cells

There are various hormones that your white blood cells use while fighting foreign bodies. They can affect their response time and effectiveness. Your body produces most of these hormones during sleep.

Without adequate sleep, you’re going to lack these hormones. As a result, your white blood cell response time can be inadequate. Therefore, when you get sick it will be worse than it normally is, and recovery will take longer.

Lack of sleep promotes heart diseases

Sleep can affect your health in some other very serious ways. For example, it can easily lead to weight gain if you don’t get enough sleep. This can substantially increases your risk of contracting heart diseases.

High blood pressure

Heart disease is incredibly serious, being a leading death factor for hundreds of thousands of people annually. Additionally, when you’re dealing with heart problems, your body has a harder time dealing with any other illnesses you might get because it’s essentially distracted.

Getting more sleep

In order to get better sleep, you’ll need some work. You’ll need to commit to a consistent schedule that your body can follow and become used to. By sticking with a schedule, your body has a much better time doing what it needs to do. It won’t be wondering when you’re going to be going to sleep. You can also use some sleeping aids if that’s what helps you. But whatever it takes, you need to be getting between seven to nine hours of sleep every night.

How Your Immune System Benefits From A Good Night's Sleep