Did anyone have “sleep crisis” on their 2020 disaster bingo card?
Go ahead and X that baby off.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 3 adults in the US are wrestling with a public health epidemic that’s linked to higher rates of car crashes, illness, addiction, heart disease, poor job performance, and increased negative thoughts. And unlike most of 2020’s mayhem, this particular pandemic is cozied right up with us in our homes and our comfy beds.
There’s no escaping the fact that we desperately need more sleep.
If a healthy baseline is 9 hours a night, most of us are falling short, with totals between 6 and 8 hours of sleep, some of us even less. Anyone who’s lived with sleep deprivation knows how debilitating it can feel. Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was shocked to discover how measurably different our sleep deprived brains perform: “While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict that they’d overreact as much as they did. They became more that 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase – the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.” (LiveScience) In a study reported in Springer Science + Business Media, researchers found that “people who sleep for shorter periods of time and go to bed very late at night are often overwhelmed with negative thoughts,” and Front Psychology reported study findingsthat folks with low sleep quality are more likely to view happiness as an all-or-none quality and evaluate themselves as a firm (and very sleepy) none.
Yikes. Thanks, 2020.
But like any dark cloud of doom, our sleep crisis comes with a hopeful silver lining. Knowing that too little sleep might be responsible for everything from our negative thoughts to our poor eating patterns means the pursuit of happiness might be as simple as the pursuit of good, healthy, restful sleep. Folks with healthy sleep patterns report greater overall satisfaction with their lives, perform better at work, and are less likely to struggle with any number of health issues.
That’s the sort of happiness we’re here for.
Here at Joi, we promise to keep bringing you all natural supplements and the best advice we can find to help you make sure you outsmart the sleep crisis and rest your way into a happier life. Because there’s enough mayhem out there in the world already – your cozy bed should be a happy place where you are restored and prepared to face whatever the rest of this year brings.
You’ve got this. And we’ve got you. Now let’s all get a little more sleep.
