Health Benefits of Sleep
Sleep is an essential part of life. Getting quality sleep on a regular basis is necessary for overall health and well-being. Sleep ensures the body to recharge and relieve fatigue, which makes the body accomplishing daily activities, work or study easily. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) regards sleep as the most effective life nourishing method. Sleep is highly recommended by the ancient scholars, as they believed that the effect of sleep on longevity can’t be replaced by other methods. The health benefits of sleep are summarized below:
Recharging the physical body
When we sleep, our body's temperature, heart rate and blood pressure decline, the respiration and part of the endocrine secretions slow down. A decline in overall metabolism not only fully adjusts different physiological functions, but also largely reduces the consumption of energetic substances, facilitating the physical recovery and recharging. Meanwhile the intestines and other organs keep on synthesizing and manufacturing the fundamental substances which can be reserved for activities when awakening.
Protecting and restoring brain functioning
Individuals with sleeping problems usually experience mood changes, fatigue, poor memory and difficulty in concentration. Extreme sleep deprivation can even cause paranoia and hallucinations. Quality sleeping makes you feeling alert and refresh, helps maintaining mental efficiency and stable mood. Sleep is important for mental consolidation, a process making connections between events, sensory input, feelings, and memories.
Enhancing immune and promoting health
The body depends on the immune system to fight against infection and harmful irritations, in order to maintain a harmonious internal environment and healthy body. Sleep enhances the production of antibodies and the fighting ability of immune cells, which are very helpful for resistance buildup. Sleep is also a time to speed up tissue and organ repairing, so that the preliminary damages caused by environment can be cleared up in time, the body can thus stay in optimal all the time.
Promoting growth and development
Sleep is essential for growth and development in children. The amount of sleep needed changes as a child grows older. Newborns sleep approximately 16 to 17 hours a day, while preschoolers need only about 12 hours a day. Before adulthood, growth hormones are released in spurts during sleep which ensures normal physical and mental development.
Promoting beauty and anti-aging
Studies has showed that elderly people who are healthy and long life usually have good sleeping habits. Since sufficient sleep promotes the body to be fully recharged and recovered from the "wear and tear" during awakening, and so the physical effects of aging will be delayed. In addition, sleep will make more blood flowing to the capillaries of the skin, that facilitates the skin’s cleansing and secreting processes. The best antidote against developing dull, wrinkled skin, age spots and lusterless hair.
From a TCM perspective, sleeping problems such as insomnia should not be identified alone, as the problems themselves involve a range of internal changes, which then give rise to various manifestations. During a TCM consultation, physicians will collect as much health information as possible and further analyze them in a systematic manner. Eventually, specific symptom profiles form the criteria for TCM diagnosis that correlate with a particular underlying disharmony. A holistic and integrated approach is used to restore a new balance of the body which is the core of TCM treatment for sleep disorders.
