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The Importance of Sleep
Throughout my career, I’ve met many integrative practitioners who emphasize normalizing their patient’s sleep as a crucial step in treating chronic illness. Sleep is a foundational process for restoring health, yet patients with chronic illnesses often suffer from disrupted sleep cycles, which can be challenging to correct.
Sleep is a tightly regulated cycle, highly responsive to environmental signals and essential for maintaining other critical body rhythms. During sleep, the body cycles through different phases, each with critical functions: deep NREM sleep heals the brain and drains toxins, while REM sleep consolidates memories and processes emotions.
A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:
Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep. NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day’s experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.
Matthew Walker is one of the world’s most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that sleep serves several vital functions, including:
