You don’t sleep enough…… You may even think that you can store up sleep. But you can’t.

Have you ever said?  “Oh, it’s okay I’ll catch on my sleep this weekend.” 

​But sadly that doesn’t work. That’s not how we’re designed physiologically. 

Our bodies need the same amount of sleep every night. Now, I know that with very young kids that’s a problem.  The kids are waking you up every night.  I get it, and until your family gets older there’s not much you can do. But if you don’t have very young kids then you must get your sleep.

Here is why….

Between 12:00am and 2:00 a.m. is when you release growth hormone and another little peak around 8:00 a.m. During these two peeks if you are not in your deep sleep, you cannot release growth hormone and cortisol ( stress hormone) levels will automatically rise. 

Your body will get inflamed and disease will inevitably set in. No doubt about it. 

Here’s another little caveat. Sleeping pills do not get you into the deepest third and fourth levels of your sleep.  These are the deep stages, where you release growth hormone. So if you take sleeping pills, your growth hormone starts to plummet. 

That’s why you often don’t feel well rested in the morning because you never got to the deep levels of sleep. There are much better sleep aids like massage therapy and exercise. You may want to try those instead if you are having sleeping troubles.

So to reiterate, you’ve got to get to your deep levels of sleep to stay healthy. You need to sleep consistently. We don’t store sleep. 

On this note I’ll end it for this week. Thanks for reading.

To your health.

​Abaigeal