Today, getting a good night’s sleep seems to evade many people. Melatonin is something sleep practitioners use in practice. Your body produces melatonin naturally. Normally as nighttime falls melatonin gets secreted into your system to help you fall asleep.
Most of us have heard about the blue light that your electronic devices such as televisions have, and that blue light can inhibit melatonin secretion and causes people to have difficulty falling asleep. So, watching a tv, being on a computer, phone or tablet before bed and make it difficult to fall asleep because they all have blue light. While they are making changes and the devises are getting better, when you have blue light exposure you decrease the melatonin and increase the chances that it will be more difficult to fall asleep.
We always want to know how much sleep is normal for the average adult. We’ve been told that it should be 7-8 hours for an adult. But sleep varies among people. We have some that we call short sleepers. They can sleep for five hours and they feel great, they get their dose of sleep they needed. The average sleep is 7-8 hours. We have found out that people that sleep less than four hours function as if they are intoxicated. That is why a lot of rules have changed, especially in medical training where they try to eliminate people staying awake for more than 24 hours. When they did a study in Philadelphia, they looked at people after 24 hours of being awake and they noticed that their response time was similar to someone that was mildly intoxicated with alcohol. So, sleep is particularly important, definitely at least four hours. Less than four hours can cause physiological problems. But we really would like to see 7-8 sleep. Again, sleep is extremely important to your well being and it does vary between people.
Make your bedroom some place that you can go to sleep; quiet, colder at night because this really does help you sleep better and no blue lights.
Melatonin has multiple roles when it comes to your body. Not only does it affect your sleep, but it also plays a role in your immune response. Having melatonin in your body is important because it stimulates immune cells to fight infections including some viral infections and respiratory infections.
