Why do we have to sleep?

Sleeping is a basic and vital activity of living beings. Specifically, humans spend almost a third of our lives asleep. Going without sleep will literally make you psychotic and eventually kill you. We tend to think of sleep as a time when the mind and body shut down. But this is not the case. Sleep is an active period in which many important restoration and strengthening processes occur. *Sleep also makes us feel better, more alert, more energetic, happier, and more able to function the next day.

One of the vital roles of sleep is to help us solidify and consolidate memories.

Overnight, some information is transferred from a more tentative, short-term memory to a stronger, long-term memory. Researchers have also shown that after people sleep they tend to retain information. Also to perform better on memory tasks. All of our bodies require long periods of sleep to restore and rejuvenate, to build muscle, repair tissue, and synthesize hormones. *Children, who acquire language, social and motor skills at a rapid pace during their development, need more sleep than adults. In fact, people have specific sleep requirements according to our age. For example, a baby needs to sleep between 14 and 15 hours a day. School-age children need between 10 and 11 hours of sleep per day and adults between 7 and 9 hours per day. However, despite how important it is for our health to comply with certain minimum hours of sleep, a very important part of the adult population does not get the necessary rest. It is estimated that, in Mexico, a third of the population has some sleep disorder and, of this proportion, 40 percent suffer from insomnia, a disease that can cause other conditions such as obesity and heart failure. In addition, it causes irritability and reduces people’s life expectancy. It also decreases your productivity and increases the risk of accidents. Unfortunately, a person cannot simply accumulate lack of sleep and then log many hours of sleep to compensate for it. It doesn’t work that way. *The best sleep habits are consistent, healthy routines that allow all of us, regardless of our age, to meet our sleep needs every night and stay ahead of life’s challenges every day. If you want more information about healthy living programs and meal plans that will help you improve your lifestyle, click here.