With as many as 31% of UK adults suffering from insomnia and 67% battling with disrupted sleep, it is clear that just like stress, there is an insomnia epidemic in the UK and it’s affecting our work, family life and relationships and health. The tongue in cheek phrase of “l’ll sleep when I’m dead,” has more truth to it than we would like to admit.

Sleep has frequently been something in our lives that we will ‘squeeze in later’. If it isn’t work stress that’s impacting on it, we just want to live our lives and eek out as much living as possible, often into the early hours. And who can blame us in this hectic 21st century world? However, if you are one of the many battling with disrupted sleep and insomnia, you know you are already feeling the effects but do you know how much it is affecting you other than feeling groggy and more short-tempered than usual? Here are 5 key reasons why you really need to look after your sleep quality and quantity:

1) PROTECTING YOUR LIFESPAN
In a study by the Canadian Medical Association it was found that women who got fewer than 4 hours sleep a night were twice as likely to die prematurely and men with poor sleep quality were twice as likely to have a heart attack and four times as likely to have a stroke. Sleep affects the length of your life but also the quality of it.

2) PROTECTING YOUR HEALTHSPAN
How long you live ‘healthily’ is also affected by the amount of sleep you get. Sleep is core to the function of your DNA and therefore your cell-building and renewal. Lack of sleep means, quite simply, a poorer building job of you, exacerbating your potential for health problems that include: strokes, heart disease, alzheimers, cancer, diabetes, depression, obesity and more.

3) PROTECTING YOUR PROFESSIONAL LIFE
In a study by the Lancet, they found that sleep-deprived individuals took 14% longer to do a task and made 20% more errors. Not only that, lack of sleep slows your cognitive function, makes thinking and decision-making harder and increases stress. That late night, team blow-out that you have every week could be starting to take its toll.

4) PROTECTING YOUR WAISTLINE
Sleep has an active job in helping keep your hormones steady and your blood-sugar balanced and if you have been trying to lose weight and failing, sleep could be your mystery factor. Sleeping fewer than 6 hours per night significantly reduces the amount of body fat and weight loss achieved versus people who slept more than 8 hours. Worse still, the lack of sleep, reduces the amount of glucose that reaches your brain, driving a built-in survival mechanism to feed it as soon as possible. Enter your chocolate craving sabotaging any weight loss goals.

5) PROTECTING YOUR BEAUTY SLEEP & LOVE LIFE
It’s not an old wives’ tale, improved sleep really does lead to better skin health and a more youthful experience as your sleep helps your DNA re-build. Add to that a boosted metabolism, higher rates of toxin removal you can see why the phrase was coined. Not only that, good moods drive great smiles and improved emotional balance all put you on the path to feeling better about yourself, other people and relationships. You might even notice a spark of energy and that libido getting fired up again.

Knowing that every aspect of our life experience is affected by our sleep; mental, physical, emotional, relationships and performance is one thing, but what to do about it? The good news is, there are strategies you can adopt easily that will day-by-day improve your sleep quality without fighting with yourself every night to just get half of forty winks.

Sussex-based company, Anderida Coaching & Health, is holding a sleep workshop in central Brighton on the 9th February. Designed to help attendees improve the quality of their sleep for a healthier, happier life it will cover the science behind why your sleep patterns are out of whack, how to improve your sleep, mind management techniques and a free personalised sleep report. Find out more about how to book here. https://www.anderidacoaching.co.uk/events/the-sleep-workshop-brighton