Last year we treated our regular blog readers at lull.com to tips on how to get better sleep in the New Year, and it proved so popular, we've decided we should open up the benefits of a Lull mattress to everybody. Why? Funny you should ask. It’s because this year we're sharing our five best reasons why getting sleep in the New Year is important. And so without further ado, we go a little something like this...
1. Lack of Sleep Affects Your Health
It’s staggering how many ways not getting proper sleep poorly affects your health. Studies have shown that hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and even cancers have all been linked to lack of sleep. Sleeping buys our bodies time to metabolize our food, thus creating and storing energy for later use. Losing sleep can prevent your body’s immune system from producing antibodies and T-lymphocytes, making you more prone to infection and reducing your ability to fight illness. Getting good sleep also helps curb inflammation, which is linked to cardiovascular disease and diabetes – all these benefits from just getting better sleep on a premium mattress! Scientific research suggests that when we aren’t able to sleep at least six hours a night, the inflammatory proteins in our bodies build up significantly more than for those of us that get a full night of better sleep.
It seems that the C-reactive protein (which is commonly associated with heart attacks) was higher in people who slept less than six hours a night on average. In fact generally speaking, 90% of people with insomnia (trouble falling and staying asleep) were found to have at least one other health condition. Likewise, people with insomnia or sleep apnea - the disorder where a person briefly stops breathing while they sleep - were able to improve their blood pressure and inflammation level just by treating their sleep disorders. People with bipolar disorder can develop mania after prolonged sleeplessness too, so whether you’re healthy or ill, good sleep is absolutely essential to survival. Don’t believe me? Though we’re not fond of animal testing, consider that rodents in studies who were absolutely deprived of sleep died of fatal infections in a remarkably short time. Sleep on that.
2. Poor Sleep Makes It Tough To Acquire Wealth The bottom line in achieving wealth or success of any kind is the amount of quality work you’re able to put into achieving it. In his best-selling book Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell suggested that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in any discipline, and we can assume productive hours are what you’re shooting for. Lack of sleep decreases focus and thus decreases productivity, no matter how much extra time you put in. Or put another way, nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Lack of sleep has also been shown to affect judgment, leading to a massive increase in car and other accidents among the sleepless. Improper sleep can make a worker less reliable too, as it tends to detract from alertness and attention to detail. A person’s reaction time actually decreases significantly when they’re operating on less sleep, giving them a hand-eye coordination similar to someone with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%! “Micro-sleep,” which is when a tired person sleeps for a few seconds at a time without realizing it, has led to incriminating driving and other machinery-related accidents. The decline in performance without sleep affects the young too – it’s been proven that college students do much worse when pulling “all-nighters” in many cases, despite actually putting in more time for study! It seems that this is because ironically, the more sleep one loses, the worse their judgment becomes about how much sleep they actually need. Naturally, many studies on lost productivity due to insufficient sleep have been done, yielding these real world numbers:
- Sleeping less than six hours per night is one of the best predictors of on-the-job burnout.
- Sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.
- Even moderate sleep deprivation lowers a person’s reaction time by 50%.
- Just a 10 to 20 minute nap can significantly improve a worker’s performance on the job (but good luck finding an employer who will tolerate that!)
Bottom line, workers lacking sleep were shown to be even less effective at performing simple tasks than those under the influence of alcohol! We recommend getting your career back on track by getting an online mattress from Lull and get some sleep.
3. Losing Sleep Negatively Affects Your Relationships Simply put, lack of sleep kills your sex drive! Not sleeping enough lowers men’s testosterone, has been linked to obesity, and totally destroys your stamina, making it really hard to please your partner, even with a high quality gel-infused memory foam mattress from lull.com (hey, we can provide you with the tools, but it’s up to you to use them). More importantly, there are numerous studies linking sleeplessness to depression, anxiety, and in extreme cases paranoia and delusion. Add sleeping pills with hallucinatory or other side effects as your remedy to this and you’ve just made a bad problem worse. It’s not worth it! More striking is what neuroscientists discovered in a series of sleep deprivation studies. It seems that sleep deprivation increases the amount of a substance called adenosine in the brain, which makes you even sleepier and suppresses arousal. This added grogginess causes the brain cells that use a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine to slow down, making the brain less responsive to the outside world.
It then becomes next to impossible to pick up on subtle cues and communicate effectively with others. Activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex also grinds down. This is the part of the brain that gives us our emotions and allows us to engage in complex thinking, like flirting or witty, attractive banter. Without it, we also might make really bad decisions and engage in inappropriate behavior toward others. It’s a known fact that we all have to be extra careful about that these days! Teamwork becomes really difficult for us too and it becomes hard for others to be around us, as we become more impulsive, and react really negatively when things don’t go our way. A person in this state tends to overreact to what they perceive as negative experiences, becoming a danger to those around them as well as to themselves. With all this potential drama, why not just get your best sleep ever with a great mattress up front? Stay professional and alert, keep you and your partner happy, and get better sleep!
4. You’re Not Getting Any Younger (and Sleep Deprivation Isn’t Helping!) Children, adolescents, and adults all need different amounts of sleep. With children, it’s especially hard to know when they’re ready for bed. Children often get wound up as the night goes on, becoming more hyper or even resisting sleep, only to crash once they actually hit the pillow. These behaviors are not dissimilar to those found in individuals with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), which has been found to occur in younger as well as older children. Those who actually have ADHD have it particularly rough, because ADHD can prevent sleep too, as can sleep apnea, which has increasingly been found in young children also. All of these factors can prevent children from getting adequate sleep despite needing more, because the younger children are, the more they need a good night’s sleep. Experts say teens and adolescents also need more sleep than the average adult: 9-10 hours per night, ideally. The stress of growing up can make teens feel tense even while sleeping, so without a mattress that can account for that, sleeping may be particularly difficult. The negative effects of this lost sleep are pretty striking. The lack of alertness and concentration that results make academic performance difficult, which adds to the stress of an already sad and emotional time in one’s life. Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young people, so keeping one’s moods in check should always be a priority.
Depression, already a common factor in reduced sleep, is that much easier to fall into when the inadequate sleeper is between 12-20. The body creates serotonin, its natural anti-depressant, between the sixth and eighth hours of sleep for these young people, so to go without it is a significant loss. It’s recommended that if adolescents have the proper diet, exercise, a regular bedtime, and are able to get the same amount of daily sleep on the right kind of mattress, they can catch up on those missing hours and be more content and effective during the day. Finally, although adults ultimately settle into 7-8 hours of sleep per night, hormonal changes and failing health can make it more difficult to sleep the older one gets. This can open adults up to sleep apnea or even diabetes and kidney disease in older age. Worse still, insufficient sleep ages a person’s skin over time, releasing cortisol that breaks down the skin’s collagen as a person struggles to sleep. Bottom line, the longer a person goes without sleep, the worse it gets for them over time. What can we do? (Read on.)
5. Now is the Best Time to Get an Affordable, Best Memory Foam Mattress We bring you these reasons to make getting better sleep your New Year’s resolution now because the sooner you get it done, the more great sleep you’ll have ahead of you. Lull's gel-infused memory foam mattress is a great choice for better sleep, especially with $50 off this holiday season. You'll have 100 nights to get the best sleep, and each patented three layer mattress comes with a 10 year warranty. As you can see from our website, our mattresses relieve pressure on your joints, lower back, and neck. They also redistribute heat to keep you cool, regardless of whether you’re sleeping alone or with a partner. It’s built to provide proper spinal alignment that allows your muscles to rest rather than try to keep your spine in place.
Our mattresses are perfect for providing you therapeutic support to make sure you have the best possible sleep that you can have at an affordable price. With sleep being so important, it’s an investment that will pay for itself over time, in no small part because it will give you more time by providing better sleep. At the end of the day, it’s the simple things in life we often take for granted, so if you’re someone who struggles to sleep or someone who sleeps well but wants to sleep more, better, and more quickly, upgrading to a Lull mattress may be just what you need. After all, it’s a new year – why not resolve to live it better?