Did you think it would be hard to start living in a healthy lifestyle?

Your first step towards a healthy lifestyle is amazingly easy. You can even do it lying in bed. It will have an immediate, massive impact on your physical wellbeing and mental health from the very first day. Here's how to start living a healthier lifestyle.

Read to the bottom, and let me explain why living a healthy lifestyle is the most important step in preventing lifestyle diseases like cancer, diabetes, obesity ... the list goes on forever.

You wish to live a healthy life. You know how important exercise is for your health and wellbeing. You know the importance of nutrition. You eat a healthy breakfast. You may even know that healthy food equals more vegetables and less meat, sugar and alcohol.

Most people are aware of all these things. However, there is one element they consistently overlook in the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle.

Very few are aware of how crucial sufficient sleep is to our health. Without adequate sleep, the positive effect of both diet and exercise crumbles.

Sleep is the foundation for all your other health efforts. If you wonder how to live a healthy, long life, start with sleeping enough, and the rest will come easier.

For example: There are more than 20 studies, which altogether included millions of people over several decades. They all come to the same conclusion. The shorter the time you sleep, the shorter your life will be.

One example to illustrate how important enough sleep is. We all know (or ought to know) that tobacco is incredibly unhealthy, and that you are very likely to catch e.g. cancer, if you smoke. The negative effect of tobacco only really emerges after 20 - 30 years.

By comparison, you experience the negative effect of sleep depravation after only a few days. If you don't sleep for 5 - 10 days, you will start hallucinating.

Lifestyle diseases

There is a clear link between deficient or poor sleep and lifestyle diseases.

It has been scientifically proven; that lack of sleep is a contributing factor to these diseases:

heart problems
blood clots
high blood pressure
atherosclerosis
dementia
Alzheimer's
obesity
diabetes type II
cancer

The list is not even exhaustive!

It is precisely this kind of sufferings one wishes to avoid by leading a healthy lifestyle.

Sleep boosts your immune system

One night with adequate sleep boosts your immune system far more efficiently than healthy food or exercise does.

If you're serious about being healthy, then your first priority should be your sleep. Sleep is the single factor that has the greatest and most crucial effect on your health and well-being.

Sleep plays a very important role in strengthening and rebuilding your immune system. When I first read this, I did not give it any significant value. It was formulated in a way that made it sound like a very small and insignificant role. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Your sleep and your immune system are very closely connected. It is not a coincidence that when you get sick, you just want to lie in bed and sleep as much as possible.

In one scientific experiment, 150 healthy volunteers were infected with a cold. They had the virus sprayed into their nostrils.

In the week up to the experiment, all participants wore a kind of sleep monitoring wristband.

The infection rate was 50% in the group which had only slept five hours on average. Compare that to an infection rate of just 18% in the group that slept at least seven hours. The infection rate was nearly three times bigger with the sleep-deprived group.

Sleep increases the effect of vaccines

Sleep also helps your immune system to form antibodies from vaccines.

The effect of a vaccine becomes significantly greater if you have had an adequate sleep in the period leading up to the vaccination.

This was e.g. shown in the following experiment.

Members of one group in the study, should only sleep four hours per night in the week leading up to their vaccinations. This group formed 50% fewer antibodies than the group that had been allowed to sleep longer than 7,5 hours.

Similar experiments have been conducted with both influenza and hepatitis A and B vaccines.

There is no reason to believe that it does not apply to other types of viruses too.

Everything suggests that you can boost the effect of your COVID-19 vaccine. Just make sure you get 8-9 hours of sleep in the days leading up to and immediately after your injection.

Blood pressure and heart attacks

Many scientific studies link cardiovascular disease to poor or deficient sleep. A couple of main points from a few of those.

A 2011 study, included nearly 475,000 men and women from eight different countries. The result was clear. Those who slept for the shortest time were 45% more likely to suffer heart attacks.

Another study looked at people aged 45 or older. It showed that you are 200% more likely to suffer a heart attack if you sleep less than six hours per night. Just one single night, where you sleep 1 - 2 hours too little, causes a noticeably higher blood pressure.

If you only sleep 5 - 6 hours per night, you are 2 - 300 times more likely to get atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries.

Protection against cancer

The elite troops in your immune system are called the killer cells, or T cells. Among other things, they detect and defuse cancer cells and other undesirable elements.

You lose 70% of these killer or T cells in just one night with only four hours of sleep. That makes it easier for cancer cells to spread to other parts of the body.

It's a proven fact, that people working night shifts have an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer. In a lab experiment on mice, cancer cells grew 200% faster in the group that was sleep deprived.

Fertility

If you're trying to get pregnant, you could do worse, than spending more time in bed - apart from the obvious reason. Both men and women's fertility deteriorates if they sleep too little.

For men, sleep increases the amount of testosterone. Testosterone is produced and released into the body when we sleep. Thus, men who are sleep deprived, have lower testosteronelevels during the day.

Men who sleep too little, have a 29% lower sperm count, and smaller testicles, compared to their peers who get good and adequate sleep.

The effects of lack of sleep occur frighteningly quick. Just one week of only five hours of sleep per day, causes your testosterone levels to decrease. The numbers drop to levels like you'd gotten 10-15 years older.

Women may also find it harder to conceive if they sleep too little. One study surveyed more than 100,000 women working evening and night shifts. They had a significantly greater degree of abnormal menstrual cycle. And they were 80% more likely to suffer from problems that made it harder to conceive.

Compare that number with the scientific fact that women who have slept adequately are 14% more likely to have sex the next day.

May the sleep be with you!

References and resources: