How to recover hours of sleep?

If you are one of those who think you are balancing your rest by staying up late today and sleeping more tomorrow, you are wrong. Recovering sleep hours is biologically impossible. The lost dream is never recovered and, additionally, it can generate health problems.

The body needs a certain number of hours of rest each day so that it can work normally. A normal sleep comprises between seven and nine hours per day. If you sleep less than that time, sooner or later you will feel the negative effects.

The body works by cycles and not as a cumulative container. If the organism does not complete a cycle, the next begins with that deficit. However, the next cycle does not borrow from the previous one to balance itself, but rather it is carried out independently.

Discover in this article how we are affected by the loss of sleep hours and why it is not possible to recover them.

The loss of hours of sleep

Sleep is a fundamental physiological process for human beings and for a good part of the animals. Actually, the brain does not rest while you sleep, but, in fact, is more active. It advances fundamental processes of organization and self-repair.

When you do not sleep enough, the first thing that is affected is your cognitive processes. You can not process information in the same way, you become less apt to learn and you have concentration problems. Also, your mood tends to be ruined.

Now, if you have designed a lifestyle in which you go to bed very late and wake up very early, you will be in deficit every day.

If, for example, you go to sleep at 2 in the morning and get up at 7, at least you have a debt of two hours a day with your body. A week, is equivalent to 14 hours, that is, two full nights of sleep.

When this lasts for a long time, the effects also begin to be permanent. That is to say that, in general, you will have a limited intellectual performance, bad humor and more of an organic problem.

Recover hours of sleep is impossible. Therefore, those lifestyles are very harmful.

Read also: How to improve the night routine to sleep better?

Recover hours of sleep

Those who believe that it is possible to recover hours of sleep begin to organize their lives around irregular cycles of rest. In addition to the consequences already mentioned, One of the effects of this situation is that the "circadian rhythm" is affected.

The circadian rhythm is a kind of biological clock that we all have. The immediate consequence of altering the circadian rhythm is a kind of chaos in the production of hormones.

The whole organism works in a synchronized way and, if you alter something, everything else is altered. It is as if you change the movement of one of the hands of the clock: the others will begin to mark a different time, or they will be damaged.

Changes in hormone production are responsible for weight gain, disorganization of appetite and skin problems, for example.

In the long run, all the metabolism is modified and that makes you more prone to get serious diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and even heart problems.

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Sleep hygiene

Instead of worrying about recovering or not hours of sleep, the correct thing is to modify your habits to guarantee you an adequate rest and take care of your health. Some advisable measures are the following:

  • Know your sleep rhythm. Make a small self-diagnosis. Record the time you go to bed and the time you get up, for about 15 days. That will give you a basic overview to know what are the measures to take to improve your rest.
  • Adjust the environment before going to sleep. Eliminate strong lights, noise and all those stimuli that can alter your sleep.
  • A good bed. If there is something that is worth investing money is in a good bed. Probably, you will spend the third part of your life in it and it has to be comfortable.
  • Set a schedule. Always lie down at the same time and do the same to get up. Keep that schedule for more than 45 days and probably transform it into a habit. You should always sleep at least 7 hours.
  • Exercise and relaxation. To sleep better it is appropriate to do at least 15 minutes of exercise every day. Never do it in the hour close to your rest. When the time comes to go to bed, the exercises you should do are relaxation.