Importance Of Rest
The hours you spend sleeping appear to offer even more than a much-needed rest. While the links forged are still tentative, one sleep study that followed nearly 500 young adults for 13 years found that those who got the least sleep were apt to gain the most weight over time, although this association trailed off after age 34.Another much smaller study suggests insufficient sleep may tamper with levels of two appetite-regulating hormones: leptin,which suppresses hunger, and ghrelin, which enhances it. When sleep was deliberately curtailed, leptin levels dipped, ghrelin levels rose, and participants reported feeling hungry.
Burrowing beneath the covers for a sound night’s sleep might have other benefits, too. Emerging evidence suggests that the hormone melatonin helps to spur production of certain immune cells and slow breast cancer cell growth. Nighttime darkness—for example, a bedroom with lights off and no flickering TV or glimmering streetlamp light—signals the pineal gland in the brain to churn out melatonin. Exposure to light during nighttime hours lessens the amount of melatonin released.
Because some research suggests that the risk of developing breast cancer rises when melatonin levels are suppressed over the course of decades, it’s worth speculating, as some experts do, that sleeping in a dark room every night may be one more way to reduce breast cancer risk. Support for this theory comes from the long-term Nurses’ Health Study data published in 2006, which showed that nurses who routinely worked the night shift for 20 years or longer had a higher rate of breast cancer than those who worked during the day.
Similar finding shave occurred in other studies comparing female night-shift and day-shift workers and in research correlating morning melatonin levels to breast cancer risk.One side effect of breast cancer treatments like surgery,chemotherapy, and radiation is that your body channels a great deal of energy into repairing or replacing damaged cells. Certain chemotherapy drugs temporarily suppress red blood cell production.Since red blood cells carry oxygen to cells throughout the body, this prompts anemia, which causes a fatigue that lifts gradually as the red blood cell count rebounds.
Yet as treatment proceeds,exhaustion may snowball, especially if you have several types of treatment.Not surprisingly, that can leave you feeling wiped out, as Dr. Kaelin found in the course of her own chemotherapy. “During my medical training—and particularly during my five-year surgical residency when I often was on call every other night—I became well accustomed to working through fatigue. Prior to being treated for breast cancer, six to seven hours of sleep left me well rested,” she notes.
Yet while receiving chemotherapy and for months afterward,exhaustion prompted her to sleep nearly twice that long at night and sometimes nap during the day, too. “Even after sleeping deeply for 14 hours straight, I would wake up feeling fuzzy headed,lethargic, and not refreshed. It took months before Is tarted feeling like myself again.”Sometimes fatigue is tied to specific health issues, such as persistent anemia, medications, poor nutrition, depression, or a thyroid disorder called hypothyroidism.
That’s why it’s important to tell your doctor about fatigue, especially if it is long-lasting. She or he can consider whether medications or a health problem might be the underlying cause.Generally, experts believe it’s wisest to give in to your body and get the rest you need right now. Removing the most obvious road blocks to a good night’s sleep will help.