Even without knowing that sleep is the most important thing you can do regularly to keep yourself healthy, you already know the consequences of not getting enough sleep on a normal day. First of all is the issue of concentration. If you don’t get enough sleep during the night, you may be unable to focus on anything for the whole day. Moreover, you may get sick easily because stress on the body caused by lack of sleep could greatly compromise the immune system. Some research say that those people who don’t get enough sleep are more sickly than those who regularly sleep on time every day.

If we focus primarily on our health, sleeping must be a close second when it comes to prioritizing what we need to do to live healthy. Sleeping every night should come before consuming huge amounts of fruits and veggies, taking some good nutritional supplements, getting adequate exercise, and not being subjected to too much stress.

It is no secret that being in a financial crisis has made people lose more sleep because they’re taking on new jobs on top of the old ones, but the thing is that we need to get our fill of sleep to stay healthy. The long term effects of sleep deprivation are staggering. You know you owe yourself the sleep you badly need if your body starts showing signs of hypertension, diabetes and heart ailments. Some say that adding 3 or 4 hours in a week to your normal sleeping patterns could greatly reduce the occurrence of these diseases.

So, how much sleep do we need, exactly? A child who is 6-12 years old should get 10 to 12 hours of sleep daily. A teenager will require less sleep, but still should rest for 9 hours at least every night. An adult can settle for 7 hours of sleep every night.

How about daytime snoozing? It’s a lot better to rest during the night time because your body can restore the melatonin levels naturally. These pigments are what causes your circadian rhythm to be the way it is. If you habitually sleep during the day, your body won’t be able to replenish its melatonin supply fast enough. The result is you won’t be able to sleep normally during the night time, and become an insomniac. The hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. are ideal for sleeping.

Melatonin is a natural hormone generated by your body’s pineal gland. The hormone is secreted during night-time to make you sleepy. This is the body’s natural way of doing a “re-boot”. You see, your body craves sleep and even if you’d rather spend most of your time being busy with something else, your body cannot deny itself the sleep it needs. Thus melatonin is secreted to make sleep come naturally. If you insist on not sleeping however, your melatonin supply is depleted.

Besides being a sleep synchronizer, melatonin is more famous for being an antioxidant. That the body produces it naturally during the night time should tell you something. The body protects itself and uses sleep as the best time to produce copious amounts of the body’s antioxidant.