Celebrate British Heart Week with us from 7th June to 15th June by getting better sleep and gifting it to your loved ones. Science has found strong links between good sleep and heart health - and vice versa. You can decrease your risk of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease by making sure that you get good sleep every night.
The Link Between Good Sleep and Heart Health
According to Harvard Health, poor sleep not only puts you in a bad mood, makes you less productive and lowers your quality of life, but it can also endanger your heart health. Whether you suffer from a condition that causes insomnia or you just don’t get good sleep because of too much work or too many other activities, your heart can be in danger.
If you don’t get good sleep - you have an irregular sleep pattern or you don’t sleep long enough or deep enough - you can develop several cardiovascular risks. These risks include high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and coronary artery disease.
What Happens When You Don’t Get Good Sleep
Getting less than six hours of good sleep per night is dangerous to your heart health. When you lack sleep, even for a single night, you accumulate higher levels of stress hormones in your blood and other substances that indicate inflammation, which is a main factor of cardiovascular disease. Not sleeping enough also causes disruptions in your normal biological processes such as blood pressure and glucose metabolism. During deep sleep, which can only be achieved during longer periods of sleep, your heart rate and blood pressure lower. If you don’t get good sleep, this often results in high blood pressure.
Getting too much sleep can also affect your health, though research has not shown definitively how or to what extent. Research does show, however, that there is a calcium buildup in the heart artery walls and stiffer leg arteries in those who regularly sleep more than nine hours a night.
Even if you are not overweight or a smoker, exercise regularly and not at a high-risk age for heart disease, you are still at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease if you don’t get good sleep.
Video from National Sleep Foundation
Take care of your heart by making sure that you are getting good sleep every night. Do ambient light and snoring or other sounds disrupt your sleep and you can’t get away? Get a bamboo charcoal powder eye mask for sleeping with free ear plugs to block out light and sound no matter where you are. Does your own snoring or back pain keep you awake or cause you to wake up too soon? Try a shredded memory foam pillow to get your head, neck, shoulders and spine in the proper positions during sleep to to stop snoring and reduce pain and stiffness. Do you have a condition that causes pain all over your body? Use a memory foam mattress topper to relieve pressure points to ease the pain so you can get some good sleep.