We’ve all been there; we think that if we can just keep pushing through, we’ll be fine – we won’t get sick like everyone around us. We tell ourselves that our body is simply strong enough, as we try to survive on 6 hours of interrupted sleep a night. Then, it hits, and we’re laid up in bed for a week with a stuffy nose and body aches, regretting the decision to stay up until one in the morning to finally finish that book we’ve been wanting to read. Now, we are left with the decision: sleep it off or try to power through.
If you’re one of the people who tries to sleep it off, you’re going to get better quicker than if you decide to just keep powering through. But truth be told, it’s a little too late. To ward off getting sick in the first place, try implementing a good sleep pattern before it hits. Let’s read more about how quality sleep boosts your immune system.
How much sleep is enough?
The amount of sleep your body needs changes as you age, with babies needing about 16 hours a day, then you’ll need half of that amount by the time you’re in your twenties, as long as you keep other good habits like exercising and eating well. If you miss the mark of the recommended sleep more often than you hit it, you’re not alone. On average, at least one-third of all adults in developed countries don’t get an appropriate amount of sleep.
A misconception is that you can “catch up” on sleep. Not exactly. If you sleep 5-and-a-half hours a night during the week, suddenly sleeping 11 hours on both Friday and Saturday night isn’t going to make your body a level playing field. Instead, your body relies on a consistent sleep schedule of about 7 to 8 hours a night to improve its immune system.
Sleep deprivation is directly linked to immune responses to viruses
If you’re repeatedly depriving your body of enough sleep, you are increasing the susceptibility to the common cold and other viruses. People that sleep an average of 7 hours per night have a higher chance of fighting off a common cold, while people sleeping less than that significantly increase their chances of becoming ill.
In fact, short sleep is the biggest factor when determining whether you will get sick when exposed to a virus. Sleep researchers showed that people who sleep six hours or less a night are four times likelier to become sick than their counterparts.
If you do happen to get sick with something like the common cold, your body will recover quicker if you’ve been sleeping an appropriate amount before you caught the virus, to fight it off. While your body needs extra sleep to fight off a virus if you do get sick, those who were sleep-deprived before they came down with a cold are likelier to have a prolonged recovery in comparison to people who slept enough to begin with. There’s just no denying it: sleep is pivotal in making sure your body stays healthy.
How does sleep improve the immune system?
How is the immune system is boosted if you get enough sleep? First, your body doesn’t simply keep operating the same way while it’s sleeping as it does when it’s awake. It changes strategies in a variety of ways to make sure that when you wake up in the morning, you are fully protected with anything that comes your way. Your body sets its defense mechanisms to combat illnesses at night in the following ways:
- Your body becomes a furnace against pathogens. Sleep is the ideal time for your body to create a fever. Why? A fever increases a body’s metabolic rate, requiring more energy to simply exist. During this time, the body has more energy resources to fight off any viruses because your body isn’t using it for things like walking, talking, eating, and thinking. This is one of the reasons that when you get sick, you feel even less great when you hit the hay; your body amps up those temperatures to kill off pathogens while you rest to use the available energy it has. During non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM sleep) your body can regulate its temperature, so may even shut off REM sleep to do so.
- During sleep, your body decides how to repair itself by arranging sleep stages in the way most prioritized to do so. During NREM sleep, or dreamless sleep, your body does more work to repair itself than during REM sleep. During NREM sleep, the body works to regenerate tissues, bones, muscles, and strengthens the immune system.
- Messengers in your body, known as cytokines are released during sleep. These messengers relay information by sending signals to coordinate and manage immune responses to pathogens, and to prompt the body to go into specific stages of sleep to heal it. During sleep, not only do cytokines do their best work, they also are produced during this time. That means by skimping on sleep one night, your body isn’t set up to sleep well the following night, either. Getting appropriate amounts of sleep before you get sick allows your body to be better equipped with cytokines if you do fall ill.
Sleep if your number one defense
It can be hard to justify getting enough sleep each night, but ultimately, you’re going to have a stronger immune system if you can get some shut eye. If insomnia is a problem for you, talk to your doctor to see if there are underlying issues.
