Sleeping More to Reduce Your Risk of COVID-19
We all know sleep is important, but did you know that it could reduce your risk of catching coronavirus? There is science to suggest this.
Sleep is an important part of staying healthy, strengthening your immune system against infections. For this reason, it is important to sleep more to reduce the risk of one catching the virus. Although these are uncertain times, making people anxious, getting enough sleep is more important than it ever was before.
Sleep is essential to maintaining our health, which means until there is a vaccine available for the virus, sleep is key. This means that you should be getting around eight hours of good-quality sleep each night in order to function properly, ensuring you keep yourself feeling healthy.
When you have poor-quality sleep, you can affect the health of your body in different ways.
- Your mood: Poor quality sleep can take a toll on your mind and can lead to mental health problems in some cases, such as anxiety and depression.
- Stress: Not being able to sleep at night and knowing you are not getting enough hours of sleep can lead a person to becoming very stressed which can affect their mental and emotional wellbeing.
- Weight gain: Studies have shown that people who have less than six hours of sleep or more than eight hours, were unsuccessful in weight loss and were more likely to be obese. This can be seen to be the result of lower levels of leptin, which is a chemical making you feel full.
For these reasons, you want to ensure you are getting a good quality night sleep, not only reducing your risk of being affected by the virus but also allowing you to recover quickly if you do get sick.
What happens to your body if you are infected with the coronavirus?
If you are infected with the virus, it will infect cells below the voice box. The virus reaches those cells through your nose and throat through fluids where it will make its way down your windpipe or trachea.
How sick someone gets depends on the vulnerability of the person to lung infection, and how many coronaviruses get into the lung of this person. Someone who is more at risk, making them a vulnerable person, is someone with asthma, underlying medical conditions, who smokes, and is over the age of 60.
So, how can you reduce your risk overall?
To regulate our mood, physical functioning and recovery from illness, we need to sleep. When someone sleeps, their immune system releases cytokines, which is a protein helping promote sleep. Sleep deprivation can decrease the number of cytokines produced as well as reducing infection-fighting antibodies and cells being produced. For this reason, you need to ensure you are getting enough sleep to ensure you will be able to fight the infectious disease by producing cytokines.
Overall, these cytokines will help fight COVID-19 and help us respond to these stressful times of uncertainty.
Additionally, a solid night sleep can reduce someone’s risk by strengthening their bodies defences and heightens brain function. When we sleep more, our minds work better meaning we stay sharp. As well as this, we are able to decrease our chances of mental health issues by enhancing our mood.
Sleeping, therefore, is more important today as we want to ensure we reduce our risk to being infected by the virus, as well as protecting our health and wellbeing.
To ensure you are able to put these reasons into place, there are a number of different ways to sleep better, including the following:
- Keep your bedroom at an optimal temperature (between 16C-18C).
- Invest in comfortable pillows, sheets, blankets and a mattress.
- Stay active
- Keep a healthy diet
- Take time out your day to relax