Sleep is essential for good health. There are real medical consequences to sleeping poorly over time, like heart conditions, weight gain, diabetes, depression, elevated stress levels, and poor memory function. Everyone knows one bad night’s sleep can make you cranky, but not many people realize that lack of quality sleep puts you at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease — regardless of age, weight, smoking, or exercise habits. In one sleep study from 2013, people who got less than six hours of sleep each night were more likely to be obese, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes.
It’s time we focused on those 3,000 hours a year we spend in bed sleeping! It’s affecting our health much more than we think, and there are solutions that make sense, like choosing bed linens that regulate your body temperature.
We’ve all experienced that too-hot feeling that wakes us up just long enough to kick off the covers. How many times a night does that happen to you? Then what about moments later, when you realize you’re too cold now, and you have another ‘mini’ wake up to put the covers back on! This pattern can continue all through the night and contribute to a less-than-fulfilling night’s sleep that leaves you irritable and still tired even after your second cup of coffee the next morning.
And did you know that these sleep-wake patterns also contribute to your hormonal balance? Poor sleep causes stress, which can aggravate hypothyroidism leading to weight gain. That’s the science behind why doctors often cite quality sleep as a major factor in keeping weight off, and avoiding type 2 diabetes.
Another little known sleep fact is that your body releases 200-500ml of water during the night! We were amazed to hear this statistic, and it’s true for every single person – this isn’t just menopausal women we’re talking about here. So, the temperature fluctuations we experience during the mini wake-ups we mentioned above have dehydrating consequences as well. Who knew so much was going on while we sleep? Once we learned about these nocturnal disturbances at ZayZay, we put our minds to creating bed linen that breathes with you and allows a flow of air on the skin that can reduce mini wake-ups and provide a much more restful sleep cycle.
Finally, sleep is an absolute necessity for proper and thriving brain function. While we sleep, neurotoxins that have built up in our brains during the day are removed, discarded by our bodies to repair our mental capacity. This overnight work is imperative to basic neural patterns, so much so that if these functions don’t get carried out, we can experience serious consequences including dizziness and hallucinations. There’s a reason that sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture! Yet we rarely prioritize our sleeping habits to make sure those functions are carried out optimally.
At ZayZay, we want everyone to enjoy healthy, fulfilling sleep, and avoid all these health complications. That is why we spent so much time researching the perfect thread count and cotton fibre for sleeping. If poor sleep can contribute to all these spiralling health factors, why get on that path with the wrong bed linens?
by Tracey Gee
