“It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night, To eat bread earned by hard toil – all this God gives to his beloved in sleep” (Psalm 127)
The other day I heard a fascinating segment about the benefits of sleep on the podcast version of ‘60 minutes’. Research shows that people -especially young people- sleep less and less. However, there is new scientific proof that sleep is extremely important for all sorts of psychological and physiological processes.
Eight hours of sleep will help you:
- Process information
- Improve your memory
- Reduce the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke.
- Loose weight (!): your body produces Leptin during sleep which prevents you from overeating.
Click here to listen to the episode, or click here to watch the segment online.
Good day, father!
I think that maybe I’m one of the exceptions cause even when I’m on graveyard shift and most of the times I’m up til 12 midnight, I don’t really gain weight even if I take in lots of carbohydrates and fats. I always think that it depends on your genes and lifestyle (exercise and diet). I have also seen people who are working at call centres here in Cebu, Philippines and because we cater to US customers, work time is usually from 10 pm to 8 am the next day. About 95% of patient-workers I had have high blood pressure and upper respiratory infections! Working in the middle of the night like them not only result to hypertension and other cardiovascular problems but it also lowers body resistance to infections.
This story is apparently making its round. A few weeks back I heard a story about this on the excellent NPR Sciene Friday podcasst:
God bless,
Stefan
I love the picture of Garfield… isn’t that how we should all live? Eating lasagna and sleeping on big fluffy pillows
Maybe thats what’s wrong with me (amongst other things); I get up around 6:00 AM, but very rarely get the chance to go to sleep before midnight.