Every fatal disease can have some connection with sleep. The best health comes from a sound sleep
There is a well-known book about sleep called Why We Sleep. The author Matthew Walker is a hypnosophy expert. He was once a professor at Harvard Medical College and is now at University of California, Berkeley specializing in psychology and neurosciences.
At the beginning of the book he wrote: “Scientists have discovered a revolutionary recipe to prolong your life. It can also improve your memory, add to your charm, help you keep slim and maintain a proper appetite, protect you against cancer, senile dementia and colds, and reduce your risk of having heart disease, myocardial infarctions and diabetes. You will feel happier and be free from anxiety and depression. Do you wish to know what the recipe is?”
Professor Walker answered his own question: “This effective prescription for every disease is not Hermes, but sleep.”
In today’s society, almost every adult has had such experience of suffering tiredness during the daytime due to poor sleep the night before, including the former U.S President Obama, who, it is said, sleeps only four hours every night.
In fact, poor sleep during the night brings many more and serious problems besides a “weary day”, including hypophrenia, physiological maladies, mental disorders, character defects and even physical danger. These is not casual assumptions, but proven by data with numerous scientific experiments done during over many years.
Below are some opinions to share with our SPA people:
The two most significant sleeping states are NREM and REM. The Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep can improve physical health and immunity and Rapid Eye Movement sleep (which means having dreams) can enhance brain functions. These two sleep types decide the quality of your sleep. Therefore, it can be said that children who have a lot of dreams during sleep are normally cleverer than those who don’t.
If you sleep less than five hours just one night, your Natural Killer immune cells which are responsible for fighting against cancer cells will decrease by 70%. That’s why people with a lack of sleep are more likely to have intestinal cancer, prostate cancer or mastocarcinoma. So maybe the increasing rate of cancer among modern people is not because we have lived longer but also because we have slept less.
Lack of sleep will increase the growth of cancer cells. When experiments are done on rats with tumors, the rats which have less sleep show a much quicker increase in the tumor size. The World Health Organization has therefore listed sleep insufficiency as one of the carcinogenic factors.
Sleep is more important than diet and exercise. If we deprive a man of 24 hours’ sleep or food or exercise, sleep deprivation results in the biggest harm.
People over 45 years old who sleep less than 6 hours every night have 200% more risk of having myocardial and cerebral infarctions than those sleeping 7-8 hours.
Insufficient sleep also influences one’s intelligence because the lack of REM does harm to the health of brain cells. As a result, Alzheimer’s disease becomes more likely to occur. Former Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and former President Ronald Reagan were both energetic persons who slept only 4-5 hours every night and unfortunately they both later suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. So Walker predicts that the next dementia sufferer might be Mr Trump.
When a man stays awake for 19 hours continuously, it will be as if he is drunk, both physically and mentally. That’s why many police in some countries try to extort a confession from prisoners by keeping them from sleep. Prisoners who are deprived of sleep for over 40 hours will sign their names on any document you give to them because what they solely want at that moment is sleep.
Drinking coffee is like taking medicine which hinders you from having enough sleep. If you have already become addicted to it, please only drink before 1 pm.
Alcohol will by no means help you sleep, but actually harms it. A little bit of alcohol will kill REM sleep and make us fail to dream, which seriously influences one’s intelligence.
One of the reasons why we cannot sleep well is the room temperature which thanks to central heating or air-conditioning violates the natural law for good sleep. Comparatively cooler is better for sleep.
Alarm clocks are harmful to health, especially the Snooze function on the alarm which rings every five minutes. It means your heart experiences sudden pressure 3-4 times within a very short period. In the long term, it exerts a big effect on the cardiovascular system.
Daylight Saving time shifts are a very stupid and harmful system because it is so disruptive and forces people to sleep one hour less. On the first day of the Daylight Saving time every year, there are unfailingly more cases of myocardial infarction and car accidents.
Lack of sleep lack also affects sexual functions. Males who sleep less than five hours every night have much smaller testes than those who sleep over 8 hours. For females, lack of sleep can induce infertility or miscarriages.
Sleep-deprivation is a significant factor in obesity too. It decreases leptin levels which is related to satiety and increases ghrelin levels which makes you feel hungry. If you don’t sleep enough during weekdays, no matter how long you sleep on weekends, it won’t help.
Nearly every fatal disease is impacted in some way by sleep insufficiency. If people can have a sound sleep, many problems can be improved or solved.
Then in the SPA business too, it is undoubtedly a highly effective approach to help guests to obtain health by helping them sleep well.