Breaking Down the Importance of High Quality Sleep

With a deeper dive into some of the hormones affected by sleep and some tips to improve your sleep.

This week I want to chat about something that I think is incredibly valuable and oftentimes completely overlooked. That topic is sleep. Sleep is not just a passive state of rest, but an active process that is essential for our health and well-being. During sleep, our body and brain perform various functions that support our physical and mental health, such as tissue repair and hormonal regulation. Getting enough quality sleep can improve our mood, cognition, metabolism, immune system, and cardiovascular health. On the other hand, chronic sleep deprivation can increase the risk of many diseases and disorders, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and dementia. We will explore the importance of sleep for our health, focusing on two main aspects: how sleep facilitates recovery and how sleep affects our hormones. We will also provide some tips and strategies to help you improve your sleep quality and quantity.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

We are starting with the importance and general overview of what sleep does for the body. It is our body’s time for recovery, this is when our body shuts down many other systems to clean out toxins built up throughout the day, it diverts energy from conscious effort to recovery. This is the time when your body clears out the fatigue from training volume and puts a large amount of effort into repairing and more importantly growing your muscles. As the fatigue that we accumulate builds, the repair that is needed for our muscles is much greater, however, fatigue is cumulative, and we only have so much of it that we can dedicate to each aspect of our life. What I mean by this is that each stressor within our life reaches into that fatigue pool that we have, and we only have a limited amount of it to give before we need to go into a true recovery period where we clear the fatigue out of our system the best that we can, in order to start accumulating it again. I am sure you have felt this in your day-to-day life, getting out of a long stressful day of work it can feel like you have done a full workout in that time. That fatigue is the same fatigue that builds when we perform exercise, and your body needs to have the ability to recover from it just like it does with exercise. Rest can help limit the accumulation of fatigue, but it is truly sleep when we begin to clear out this fatigue. One of our primary goals with regular exercise is to “increase that base level of activity” What I mean when I say this is increasing the total amount of fatigue that your body can handle and recover from in a timely manner. All of this does end up being trainable but it takes time just like anything else, doing more and more low-intensity activity can build up that bank of fatigue, pending you follow similar principles to what we do with exercise, push it a bit further and a bit further, until you get to your cap, take that time to rest and recover it all out, then start that process all over again. Pairing sleep with the idea of clearing out fatigue that has accumulated can help us understand why it is so important that we aim to get 7-9 hours of sleep each night.

Next, I want to briefly touch on some of the more important hormones that are affected by sleep and the mechanisms in why they get affected, especially the ones that are more important to getting back involved in our lives. The first one that I want to chat about is cortisol, this being our stress hormone. With a lack of quality sleep, the whole signaling of cortisol can be thrown off, it peaks to help us wake up and come out of a deep sleep during natural sleeping habits, it also aids with regulation of our thyroid hormone (a huge player in our metabolism) as well as the overall increase in how difficult and stressful day to day tasks are if it is not allowed to be properly regulated. For most hormones you will find, sleep is the true regulator of them, helps bring them back to a normal level, and go through a natural cycle that your body is meant to follow to bring it back to baseline. Without sleep, our cortisol levels may not reset n the deepest points, thus bringing our peak far higher and creating an increased sense of stress. Thus continuing the spiral with elevated levels of cortisol and stress.

The next major one that I want to talk about is our hunger-signaling hormones. Leptin and ghrelin. These hormones are the ones that signal to our brain when we are hungry as well as when we are full. Poor sleep has been found to disrupt the production and levels of these hormones. Disruption of the natural levels and production of ghrelin and leptin can create too much hunger signaling or not enough fullness signaling. This can then lead to a dangerous spiral in either direction that relates to the topics that we have already covered. Too much grehlin production and you will feel like you’re hungry all the time causing large amounts of overeating. Never something that we want to experience. Grehlin is the main hormone responsible for that sensation of feeling hungry, as you can imagine too little signaling as well can also lead us to feeling like we aren’t hungry and undereat often, this can then send us down that starvation loop which equally as bad as eating too much food. On the other hand, leptin is the main hormone responsible for telling your body that it is full, so as you can probably see where this is going, the same effects happen as when grehlin signaling is off which will either cause overeating or undereating depending on how the production of these hormones are affected. Arguably one of the worst ways that this can be affected is limited leptin production and overproduction of ghrelin, causing us to eat and eat, then not enough leptin production to overcome how strong the hunger signaling is so then you’re eating and eating with no satisfaction found. This disruption is a huge hindrance to our goals to properly fuel our bodies and keep our energy intake regulated. 

Another hormone that I want to highlight is growth hormone. Sleep is when your body produces almost all of its growth hormone. When you impact your sleep either by not enough or not good enough quality, you are lacking a lot of the benefits that growth hormone can give you. Growth hormone is a large signaling force for muscle protein synthesis which is our body's ability to grow and repair muscle. You’ll be less sore and have a greater ability to grow from each workout that you perform. Growth hormone is also responsible for boosting your metabolism as it is a signaling force within your body to make sure your body is using that available energy during sleep to build as opposed to just storing it for a later date. It impacts your metabolism as well with just building muscle in general which is one of the primary drivers of increasing your metabolism (more muscle = more metabolic activity!). There is also some evidence that suggests growth hormone can play a big factor in our immune response which can help us stay healthy and active, thus further working toward achieving our goals! As you can see the disruption of your natural growth hormone production can lead to a whole slew of cascading effects down the chain, that is why getting the sleep so your body can synthesize these hormones and keep the levels well regulated is key to it all!

Now as we always do, I want to highlight some of the key points but also give you applicable tips that you can apply in your day-to-day life so we can start to make those actionable changes. Nothing changes unless you do. There are other aspects of sleep that we have not covered here but we covered some of the biggest ones that relate to muscle growth, performance, and working toward your goals whichever direction they may be in. Applying these to improve your sleep is never an easy one, sleep hygiene is an idea that needs to be explored a bit deeper to improve the sleep quality that we get. Making sure we set ourselves up for success with sleep is going to be key! Like everything else, consistency is one of the most important variables in sleep. Making sure that we get a consistent 7-9 hours each night depending on what your body needs. Along with that, going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time will help set your circadian rhythm to line up with your daily needs. This will ensure that your body is producing melatonin to make you feel sleepy at the right times, as well as knowing when to release cortisol to wake you up. Another great idea to improve your sleep quality is setting a nighttime routine, this can be a yoga routine, this could be reading, this could be anything that helps your brain settle down and unwind, ideally away from screens and artificial light as that can affect our melatonin production. This is not easy to do but getting into a habit that once you start it your body knows that it is going to be time to go to bed shortly after can be another great way to increase that signaling. Lastly, something that I think will be very important for many of us that should be touched on, is the idea of sleep debt. The more that we brush off getting good quality sleep the more that we build up a bank of sleep debt. Which is just a backlog of sleep that our body needs to clear out that excess fatigue. Some people may have been borrowing from their future sleep more than others so they may have a bigger backlog of sleep debt that needs to be paid off. Many of these tips and ideas may not be seen until that backlog of sleep debt is paid off, leading to a further struggle and disruption down the way. 

I hope I outlined the importance of sleep and why it is crucial for you to get not only enough sleep but also enough high-quality sleep in order to help springboard you toward your goals and lead a healthy lifestyle. Following the tips laid out is going to be a good basis to start, making sure that we set that routine and get those nighttime habits established can get us on a good pace to paying back that sleep debt and ensuring that our body is able to do what it needs during sleep. Setting ourselves up for success in the following day. 

If you need further ideas on how to improve your sleep quality always feel free to shoot me a message, or if you have topics that you’d like me to chat about, questions, clarity, or any other feedback please feel free to reach out to my email at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com also share this around with anybody who may find some useful information within this or any of my other posts. The more people that get the information to them, one step at a time we can hopefully work to build a more healthy society!

Until next time,

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS