Poor sleep patterns and a busy work schedule lead to serious health problems. If a person regularly sleeps less than eight hours, he may develop serious heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Therapist and candidate of medical sciences Andrei Kondrakhin told Vechernaya Moskva more about this.
What is happening
According to him, if a person adheres to the same time for waking up and going to bed, his body adjusts its internal schedule.
“This allows you to feel better during working hours and fully rest at night. For example, if a person needs to get to work by 10:00, he wakes up at 07:00, and he should always go to bed no later than 23:00. If he sticks to this schedule on weekends, the body will get used to it and waking up will be easy, regardless of the season,” Kondrahin explained.
If your bedtime schedule is too different, it disrupts your body’s natural biological processes (circadian rhythms). The person ceases to fully recover, which subsequently leads to health problems. All body systems begin to suffer, including:
- Cardiovascular system.
- Kidney.
- liver;
- brain;
- Emotional state.
— When a person is not resting, he has to put in more effort to perform normal tasks. First of all, this leads to fatigue of the cardiovascular system, because the brain requires increased blood circulation to provide vital functions. Then cortisol levels rise, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and shortness of breath appears. Kondrakhin explained that the liver and kidneys stop removing toxins from the body.
The longer a person adheres to an incorrect sleep pattern, the greater the likelihood of developing diseases. particularly:
- Diabetes.
- High blood pressure.
- Cognitive impairment.
- Ischemic disease.
- Low immunity
- Digestive system problems.
- Psychological disorders.
What to do to avoid this
The therapist said that you can prevent the development of serious diseases if you adjust your daily routine:
- Sleep regularly for at least eight hours.
- Go to bed and wake up at the same time (even on weekends);
- Maintaining physical activity (hiking, fitness, exercise);
- Take a nap during the day.
— Sleeping during lunch is a work life hack, especially for office workers who spend most of their time in front of the computer. It will be useful for them to take a nap even for half an hour, because during this time the brain will have time to reset itself. Kondrakhin concluded by saying: “After this break, the person feels better, and his productivity increases.”
Although eight hours of sleep is considered the optimal time for recovery, more than 800 Muscovites get enough sleep faster due to a mutation in the SIK3 gene, scientists have found. People with this disorder need only a few hours of sleep to maintain their cognitive abilities at a high level. “Moscow Evening” learned from a specialist that people get enough sleep faster and whether it is possible to change their sleep rule.