Four Reasons Sleep Helps When You Are Sick
You really appreciate how important sleep is for healing when you get sick.
I have a deep respect for the wisdom of the body.
So, when I was sick and my body needed sleep, I allowed it all the sleep it craved.
That turned out to be 11 hours every night for over a week.
So, what is happening when you get sick and feel tired and need extra sleep?
First, your body is busy fighting infection and that takes energy.
Feeling tired slows you down, allowing your body to deploy resources toward the task at hand.
Paradoxically, when you are sick you probably don't want to eat much.
Believe it or not, eating and digesting use up a lot of energy!
Although food is important for energy over the long term, we have energy stored in our cells, so during the emergency situation that sickness is, the body uses stored energy.
Another important thing that happens when you sleep and refrain from eating is something called autophagy.
Autophagy means "self-eating," which sounds kind of gross.
But this is how your body deals with dead and dying cells as well as infected and diseased cells.
The body literally digests these infected cells with powerful enzymes, reducing them to their components for reuse or elimination, and killing the infection along the way.
Autophagy, critical for dealing with infection, is maximized when you fast for a period of time, as well as during sleep. The body triggers a fast by making you not want to eat. It induces more sleep by making you feel exhausted.
A third reason sleep is so important is that while you sleep your body releases melatonin.
This stimulates downstream factors involved in fighting sickness.
One of these is detoxification.
Detoxification organs such as the liver kick into gear, eliminating things the body needs to get rid of and out of the body.
Fourth, sleep is when your immune system goes into high gear.
The communication cells of the immune system, called cytokines, are produced.
Immunological memory is enhanced allowing the body to better target infection. An army of immunological "patrol troops" is hard at work, scouring the body to get rid of infection.
When you are sick and want to sleep a lot, your body is sharing its wisdom with you.
Listen to it and follow its lead.