Did you know that we spend about 26 years of our life sleeping? So why do we still need our beauty sleep?
During sleep, your body gets to repair itself and recover, resulting in a bundle of awesome benefits for your looks. Anything less than 7 hours is likely to affect your appearance negatively.
Want to maintain a youthful look? Nothing can give you a younger look than getting up to 7 to 9 hours of shut-eye every night. Believe it or not, your skin’s overall health depends on the quality and quantity of sleep you get every night. Sleeping recharges your body and skin. It heals, restores, and eliminates toxins from your system.
How Does it Work?
Your body starts producing growth hormones within the first 3 hours of sleep from the pituitary gland. The hormone maintains youthful and radiant skin as you advance in years. Without its release, there’s no skin repair from daily damage. Therefore, the human growth hormone might slow down the aging process.
Melatonin production increases within the middle two hours of your sleep. This hormone regulates your sleep/wake patterns (circadian rhythm). It is also an antioxidant that protects your skin from free radical damage.
During the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep or the last three hours, there’s a decrease in levels of cortisol (stress hormone). There’s also a drop in the skin’s temperature to the lowest point. This allows muscles to relax and be immobilized, giving your skin the night’s deepest recovery.
Begin adding one to three good hours of quality sleep to your nightly schedule and you could realize some improvement in just a day! Continue for at least 2 weeks and everyone would be asking you what your beauty secret is.
How Does the Lack of Sleep Affect Our Looks?
A good night’s sleep doesn’t just make your skin appear younger. It also affects the following areas:
- Eyes. Dark circles collect under your eyes if you only get a few hours of sleep. This is because the blood doesn’t flow properly in such cases. It collects and becomes visible since your skin is thin. Enough shut-eye eliminates these puffs.
- Hair. Lack of sleep affects the rate of hair growth, loss, breakage, and damage. Blood flow supplies nutrients, vitamins, and minerals to hair follicles. Less sleep reduces this supply. As a result, your hair receives less food, weakens, and becomes less healthy. Less shut-eye also increases the level of stress, leading to an increase in cortisol. This hormone causes hair loss.
- Happier and Healthier Look. Getting less sleep makes your mouth’s corners droop. This can make you look sadder than when you’ve come from a good night’s sleep.
3 Tips on How to Sleep Better
- Create a routine. Creating a bedtime routine is not just about the time you go to sleep and wake up, but it also involves the things you do before you go to bed.
- Focus on a comfortable bed and bedding! Think about cooling pillows for summertime and warm blankets for winter. You want to get a good night’s sleep, no matter the temperature.
- Keep Electronics Out Of Bedroom. All devices that emit light are promoting wakefulness and make it harder to fall asleep, so It’s better to keep the TV, laptops, phones, and tablets out of the bedroom.
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You can read more about getting better sleep in this article.
As you see, we all need some good quality beauty sleep. Your sleep patterns determine to a great extent how your skin looks. Get quality and quantity shut-eye and your skin, hair, eyes, and general look improves and glows with life. Do the opposite and expect your whole body to appear older and less healthy.
