Why Is A Good Night’s Sleep Is Vital For Your Heart Health

It’s well known that sleep isn’t a luxury but a necessity. It’s necessary for you to function correctly during the day and for multiple health benefits related to the repair and recovery of your body that occurs during your sleep.

However, there are a few surprising benefits to getting the right amount of shut-eye each night. Your mind certainly benefits from adequate rest. But your heart can actually be affected by both a good night of sleep and a lack of sleep.

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

According to the CDC, most adults need seven to nine hours of sleep per night. It may seem like you can do with fewer hours, but depriving yourself of the correct amount of sleep will lead to severe problems later on down the line. Even missing one night of proper sleep will reduce cognitive function and a greater risk of adverse health conditions.

How Can Sleep Affect Your Heart?

There are multiple benefits of getting enough hours of sleep at night, many of which are observed closely. However, the effects that a good night’s sleep has on your heart tend to go overlooked in the grand scheme of things. For the most part, getting the right amount of sleep helps prevent several heart problems.

When you sleep, your blood pressure goes down drastically. Without adequate sleep, your body will release larger amounts of cortisol, a glucocoricoid hormone produced by your adrenal glands. It’s responsible for regulating your body’s stress response by keeping you on high alert when your fight-or-flight response is activated.

However, too much cortisol can lead to your heart working much harder to keep your body in an elevated state of alertness. Your heart is a muscle, and like all of the other muscles in your body, overworking it will lead to it breaking down. If your blood pressure goes up, it will stay up for longer and cause hypertension eventually. If it goes untreated for too long, hypertension will lead to heart disease, heart attack and cardiac arrest.

In addition, not getting enough sleep can cause an increase in your stress levels. Changes in your brain and body will make you less capable of dealing with stress, lower your immune system’s defenses, and decrease your cognitive function. These issues will make it harder to succeed at work or school, cause you to become sick more often, and experience a more significant amount of emotional reactivity.

High-stress situations send a signal to your amygdala to activate your fight-or-flight response. This response, in turn, causes your heart to work much harder to keep you alert which if prolonged can increase the risk for heart disease. Combined with high blood pressure, these conditions will only weaken your heart over time.

Sleep Conditions That Have A Negative Effect On Your Heart

It’s challenging to overstate the importance of getting enough sleep. While most people would not choose to forego their seven to nine hours, there are medical conditions that impair the REM sleep cycle, which is where you get the majority of your rest. And over time, these conditions will hurt your heart health if they go unaddressed.

Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea syndrome describes a potentially serious condition in which your breathing stops and starts while you’re sleeping. It can be caused by some health conditions, like obesity and heart failure. There are three different kinds of sleep apnea:

• Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome is the more common form in which your throat muscles involuntarily relax, cutting off your breathing.
• Central sleep apnea syndrome occurs when your brain fails to send the proper signals to the muscles that control your breathing when you sleep.
• Complex sleep apnea syndrome happens when an individual has obstructive and central sleep apnea.

Obviously, not breathing properly will prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep. Being deprived of sleep will cause multiple health issues, including heart problems or cardiovascular disease. And if the sleep apnea has been caused by heart failure, the resulting sleep deprivation plus sleep-disordered breathing will only lead to a vicious cycle of adverse heart conditions.

Insomnia

Insomnia refers to a common sleep condition where you have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or getting a good quality of sleep. It all depends on your sleep duration. The condition is specifically marked by a lack of outside factors leading to poor sleep. Insomnia can be acute, occurring for less than three months. However, any period of insomnia that lasts longer than three months is considered chronic insomnia as it affects your sleep duration increasing the cardiovascular risk factors.

Just like with sleep apnea, insomnia leads to poor sleep. And being deprived of sleep due to any sleep disorder causes a higher risk of heart disease and heart problems.

How Can You Get More Sleep?

• Establish a regular sleep schedule. Try to go to bed around the same time each night and wake up around the same time every morning, even on the weekends.
• Participate in more physical activity. Not only is more exercise good for your heart, but it can help you sleep much better for a variety of reasons.
• Avoid artificial light at least an hour before bed. Turn off your television, phone, or computer screen. If you must look at your computer or phone an hour before going to bed, use a blue light filter to cut down on the amount of artificial light you take in.
• Try to keep your bedroom cool, dark, and quiet so you can relax in bed.
• Don’t eat or drink within two hours before bedtime. If you have to eat or drink something before bed, avoid foods high in fat or sugar, and don’t drink anything alcoholic or sugary.
• Prospective studies state sleep on a quality mattress that is firm or soft enough for your needs.

Taking Care Of Your Heart Is No Bull

By getting enough quality sleep, and much less poor sleep, you can keep your heart beating strong for a long time. And part of getting enough sleep is having a great mattress on which to sleep. That’s where No Bull! Mattress And More comes in.

Our wide selection of mattresses offers anything you could look for, from firm to soft, warm to cool, innerspring to memory foam, body mass, body position, and much more. And we’re confident in our product and its price, so much so that we offer a 5-year 100% cash back guarantee. So if you can find a better price, not only will we honor that price, but we’ll pay you the difference back in cash. We can also help you find any of the king-size beds.

If you have any questions or want to find a mattress that your heart will thank you for, get in touch with us.

SOURCES

https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/how_much_sleep.html
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/benefits-sleep-more/
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22187-cortisol
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/symptoms-causes/syc-20373410
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-activity/exercise-and-sleep