Sleep Matters So Much More Than You Think!
Sleep is fundamental to your overall health and well-being. It plays critical roles in both physical and mental health. It is during sleep that your brain is cleansed, tissues are repaired, your immune system is rejuvenated, and your memories are consolidated contributing to better wellness, cognitive function and emotional stability.
Proper sleep enhances your mood, sharpens your concentration, and supports your health, learning and problem-solving abilities. Conversely, sleep deprivation leads to a range of problems including weakened immunity, increased stress levels, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other chronic conditions including obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Prioritizing sleep is essential for maintaining a balanced and healthy lifestyle, underscoring its importance in achieving optimal wellness and quality of life. The problem is that getting a restful sleep is more difficult than ever for most these days.
We’re changing that.
Understanding Poor Sleep Better
Poor sleep is one of the most common health complaints today. In this article, you will learn a bit more about sleep and how Life Environments helps you experience a better sleep.
Sleep deprivation is a condition that occurs when you don't get enough sleep. Sleep deficiency is broader subject. It occurs when you experience one or more of the
following:
· You don't get enough sleep (sleep deprivation)
· You sleep at the wrong time of day
· You don't sleep well or get all of the types of sleep your body needs
· You have a sleep disorder that prevents you from getting enough sleep or causes poor-quality sleep
The Price of Poor Sleep
While poor sleep is an accepted inconvenience for many, the ramifications are far more insidious. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep every day. Nearly 40% of adults report falling asleep during the day without meaning to at least once a month. Also, an estimated 50 to 70 million Americans have chronic, or ongoing, sleep disorders. Sleep deficiency can lead to serious physical and mental health problems, injuries, loss of productivity, and a greater likelihood of death.
The symptoms of sleep deficiency aren’t always the same and often differ between children and adults. Children who are sleep deficient might be overly active, have problems paying attention or misbehave as school performance suffers. The result often leads to a misdiagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which only compounds problems for children.
Sleep deficiency is linked to chronic health problems including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression among other serious conditions
Scientists are revealing that fragmented sleep and sleep deprivation leave the brain more susceptible to oxidative stress, which is tied to the development of Parkinson's disease. It has also been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and other life-altering brain conditions.
Sleep deficiency is linked to greater odds of physical injury in adults, teens, and children. For example, sleepiness while driving (unrelated to alcohol) is responsible for thousands of serious car crash injuries and death. In older adults, sleep deficiency is linked to a higher chance of falls and broken bones. Sleep deficiency plays profound roles in errant human judgement linked to tragic accidents including nuclear reactor meltdowns, grounding of large ships, and plane crashes.
A common myth is that people can learn to get by on little sleep without negative effects. This simply isn’t true. Research shows that getting enough quality sleep at the right times is vital for mental health, physical health, quality of life, decision-making, performance and safety. Anything less has profound implications on cognitive and physical performance.
When you consider that one-third of your life is spent sleeping, it’s difficult to understate its importance. Still we often do because we are largely unaware of what it happening during our sleep thanks to blissful unconsciousness. Nonetheless, there are lots of critical process taking place while you are in dreamland that are necessary to life and living.
Sleep is essential to life for more reasons than you think. There’s a reason why you need eight hours of sleep and not 15 minutes. When you sleep, your body undergoes several internal transformations that restore and refresh you - one of the most important being that of cleansing your brain. When your brain has been properly cleansed, you awaken feeling refreshed and ready for your day. This is one of the easiest signs that you have slept well.
So, why is the brain so active when we sleep?
Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes of the human body is that the apparent tranquility of sleep juxtaposes with the brain’s frenetic activity during sleep. During sleep, your brain cells produce bursts of electrical pulses that cumulate into rhythmic waves – a sign of heightened brain cell activity.
Slow brain waves are associated with restful, refreshing sleep. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that brain waves help flush accumulated waste from the brain during sleep. Individual nerve cells coordinate to produce rhythmic waves that propel fluid through dense brain tissue, washing the tissue in the process. This is why a great sleep ends with you awakening refreshed and ready for your day.
The brain cells responsible for your thoughts, feelings and body movements form dynamic networks essential for memory and problem-solving. To perform such energy-intensive tasks, your brain cells require fuel. As a result, the consumption of nutrients creates metabolic waste as a result. Cleaning metabolic waste from your brain is essential to the proper functioning of your brain and long-term health and wellness. In the short term, it simply keeps you at your best – something you will feel physically.
“It is critical that the brain disposes of metabolic waste that can build up and contribute to neurodegenerative diseases,” said Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology & Immunology. “We knew that sleep is a time when the brain initiates a cleaning process to flush out waste and toxins it accumulates during wakefulness. But we didn’t know how that happens. These findings might be able to point us toward strategies and potential therapies to speed up the removal of damaging waste and to remove it before it can lead to dire health consequences.”
How Stress Impacts Your Sleep.
When stressed, you tend to think disproportionately about responsibilities, work, family, relationships and finances. For teens and young adults in school, stressors often include schoolwork, relationships amongst the countless other challenges of growing up. As you might expect, not all stressors are equal or impact us proportionately. Underlying “small” or “nuisance” stressors, especially unresolved, minor, ignored or inconsequential ones, build over time and trigger continuous releases of stress hormones. The resulting buildup of stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, adrenaline and many others impact your body adversely whether you consider them significant or otherwise. It’s important to remember that while your body can produce stress-response substances in almost unlimited amounts, its ability to metabolize them remains quite limited. As stressors continue to trigger hormone releases, the non-metabolized releases damage cells and set the stage for disease and dysfunction.
When you are stressed, stress hormones activate certain body systems that allow you to escape a threat. You may know this as your “fight or flight” response, but its effects go much deeper. Your body releases substances that increase heart rate and oxygen delivery to your muscles, helping you to escape danger. These hormones produce short-term physiological and behavioral effects including:
· narrowing of the blood vessels
· increased blood pressure
· increased heart rate and cardiac output
· increased blood flow to the skeletal muscles
· widening of the airways in the lungs
· increased oxygen consumption
· increased sodium retention
· increased glucose levels
· reduced intestinal motility
· pain relief or “analgesia”
· enhanced arousal and alertness
Unchecked physiological responses to stressors can be a dangerous thing. It is not only hostile to your wellness, but especially to both falling asleep and maintaining a restful uninterrupted sleep once you do.
“High levels of stress impair sleep by prolonging how long it takes to fall asleep and fragmenting sleep. Sleep loss triggers our body’s stress response system, leading to an elevation in stress hormones, namely cortisol, which further disrupts sleep,” Georgette Wilson, M.D., of Baylor School of Medicine explains. “Research has shown that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. Chronic sleep deprivation also has been associated with decreased metabolism and endocrine dysfunction.”
It can be challenging to get restful sleep when your mind is reacting to stressors from your daily routine. Trying to achieve a healthy and restful sleep with stressors triggering your mind and body is all but impossible. Yet without a restful sleep, your brain doesn’t get cleaned properly, which leads to serious complications over time – some deadly.
How Life Environments Improves Your Sleep Experience
Your principal sleep goal is to achieve a restful sleep that allows your body to do what it needs to do to cleanse your brain properly, which in turn allows you to awaken refreshed and ready for what your day has to offer. It’s something you can literally feel - and the goal of any responsible sleep routine.
The most important thing to remember is pills, alcohol and gimmicks do nothing to help you achieve restful sleep and often impair your ability to achieve uninterrupted sleep. Sleep pills and liquids are often habit-forming and introduce dangerous substances to your body. Alcohol and other stimulants provide zero sleep benefit and impair your body’s ability to achieve the restful sleep it needs to cleanse your brain properly. Gimmicks like colored noise (white, green, gray, etc.) offer zero benefit for healthier sleep and often interrupt otherwise healthy sleep patterns. In our internal research, colored noise caused interrupted sleep patterns and did not contribute to a restful healthy sleep. So, what about traditional nature or ambient recordings and videos? Sorry, they do not contribute to healthy sleep either.
The exception to nature audio is Life Environments immersive environments that are specifically designed to de-stress and inhibit stress prior to bedtime. Life Environments immersive audio experiences center you in hyper-realistic nature spaces that inhibit stress and refresh your mind naturally yet differently. (Learn more about Life Environments at https://LifeEnvironments.com)
In the end, the best way to a healthier sleep is to set up the proper conditions to allow your mind and body to achieve healthy and restful sleep naturally – precisely how you are designed to function. It starts with clearing your mind and stopping the release of counterproductive hormones that sabotage your efforts. Before you get into bed, eliminate distractions like noise, light, screens and stimulants that disrupt natural sleep. Remember that inhibiting the impacts of stressors and potential interruptions begins before you get into bed, not after.
Recommendations for Life Environments Customers
Life Environments recommends listening to an immersive Life Environments experience for at least 15 minutes from 30 to 60 minutes before planning to go to bed. (Never sleep with headphones or ear buds!) This not only relaxes and helps you inhibit hormonal production and impacts from previously released hormones, but also allows your body to start metabolizing existing stress hormones without increasing the load of new releases.
Life Environments immersive experiences help inhibit your stress response and the corresponding hormone releases that obstruct a restful and healthy sleep using nature’s experience. It’s new thinking that leverages nature’s experience in ways your body is designed to interact with. Once asleep, your body is free to do what it does naturally to cleanse, reset and refresh your mind and body. Over 92% of our customers who use our immersive products for sleep report feeling refreshed and energized when they wake – the very feeling you want to experience every morning!
Nature’s experience is the most effective stress inhibitor known. Life Environments leverages nature’s experience in new ways that inhibit stress safely and effectively.
How Life Environments differs from traditional nature audio and video…
Life Environments experiences are unique for many reasons. Here are just a few of them:
· Life Environments experiences inhibit stress – they do not make most people sleepy! Despite the fact that you may achieve deep relaxation, our experiences are delightful ways to simply relax and chill out.
· Life Environments experiences are highly realistic – something that shapes how your brain responds to them. Our aural experiences are no more than one-percent different from the original space that was recorded. Traditional audio cannot achieve the degree of realism your brain requires to respond to nature in meaningful ways.
· Life Environments immersive experiences CENTER you within the sounds of nature – not just play it in your ears. Unlike traditional recording that you simply listen to, our experiences surround you with nature’s lifelike experience from all directions. More importantly, all you need are headphones and/or ear buds to leverage nature’s de-stressing and refreshing benefits.
· Life Environments immersive experiences let you leverage nature’s experience whenever, wherever and however you want – and not only for sleep! You have the option to put nature to work with you wherever you find yourself in your days and nights. Our immersive experiences are also perfect for escapes through the day or to de-stress any time you need it.
· Life Environments immersive experiences are captured using proprietary technology and techniques available no place else. Our experiences are pristine; captured, cleaned, mastered and produced to deliver the most accurate experiences when compared to live nature possible. Both you and your brain will be delighted with the Life Environments immersive experience.
· Life Environments experiences are aural only. This is a critical feature that puts your mind’s eye to work in ways that help de-stress and refreshe you naturally and safely without visual distractions.
· Life Environments experiences were originally developed to help patients in healthcare environments become calm naturally without the use of drugs. The result of a calmer patient before, during and after healthcare procedures is significantly better clinical outcomes.
· Life Environments is physician approved.
· Life Environments immersive experiences are safe, flexible, effective and affordable. Available in annual subscriptions, Life Environments experiences allow you to leverage Mother Nature’s experience where, when and how you like for only pennies a day.
· Life Environments immersive experiences require no special equipment beyond non-noise-canceling headphones or earbuds to deliver a lifelike 3D aural experience.
· Simply listen. Using Life Environments immersive experiences is simple to use and delightful to hear. Better sleep has never been easier or more effective.
So, there you have it!
Hopefully you understand a bit more about sleep and how both you and Life Environments can help you achieve a more restful sleep in natural ways you will love.
To discover more about Life Environments immersive experiences, visit LifeEnvironments.com