Sleep stress recovery

Memory

Sleep stress recovery…Did you know that sleep assists your recall of events and facts? We all are probably aware of the ‘brain fog’ associated with a big weekend that extends into the working week after less than ideal sleeping patterns. This is now being backed up by scientific research. REM sleep is required to assist memory formation. Alcohol makes getting into REM sleep difficult and therefore affects your memory function.

Appetite

Leptin – a ‘you feel full’ hormone drops off when you don’t sleep so well, and Ghrelin ‘a hunger hormone’ increases.

Stress

Your overall mood, decision making and organisational abilities are impaired by lack of sleep. But also the connectivity between the emotional centres of your brain (limbic) and planning centres (frontal lobe) becomes diminished with lack of sleep hence we then rely more upon the emotional decision making (without pre-filtering through the planning part of our brain. Basically lack of sleep turns you in to a confused, over-reactive emotional numpty.