HEALTH

Have a good night’s sleep! How to sleep to be well-rested?

Sleep — constantly depreciated and treated as an unpleasant necessity rather than a real need of the body. Why can’t we appreciate it even though we sleep one-third of our lives and our health and well-being depend on proper circadian rhythm? We are introducing habits that will ensure that a good night’s sleep doesn’t remain just a wish.

Why do we need sleep?

Among Europeans, the French sleep the longest, sleeping nearly 9 hours per night. In a global perspective, they are surpassed only by the Chinese, who sleep a full 9 hours. Poles, on the other hand, rank 9th, devoting on average 8 hours and 28 minutes to sleep. Considering that about 20 percent of Poles do not go to bed without sleeping pills, the results are not optimistic.

Sleep consists of the four phases of NREM sleep and the REM phase that follows, and the cycle itself repeats several times. We need it for proper functioning, body regeneration, growth, and hormone production.

During sleep, memory consolidation occurs, responsible for organizing and remembering information, and neural networks are formed so that we wake up ready to work again in the morning. This is confirmed by a study by researchers at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which shows that sleep helps to consolidate the individual pieces of information that we have provided to our brain during the day.

We then reinforce our memories and repeat facts that will come in handy the next day*. Insufficient sleep therefore leads to disrupted physiological processes, poorer metabolism, impaired memory and cognitive abilities, and even poor mental health.