CAPE TOWN - Good sleep is a natural way in which you could improve your immune system, this is according to Monika Haack, a psychoneuroimmunologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues with the growing number of infections throughout the world, keeping your immune system up and running is an extremely important measure to protect yourself against infections and diseases.
Something as simple as good sleep alone bolsters your immune system against colds, influenza, and respiratory infections and also reduces the severity of infections with sleep even boosting the effectiveness of a Covid-19 vaccine once it becomes available with studies underway looking into the importance of sleep regarding SARS-CoV-2.
“We have a lot of evidence that if you have an adequate amount of sleep, you definitely can help to prevent or fight any kind of infection.
“How many deaths can you prevent if you sleep properly, or how much less is the severity of your symptoms? I think that needs more research," Haack told the National Geographic.
While the completion of a Covid-19 vaccine is yet to come, reducing the risk of infection as much as possible is really important and one simple way to do so is by sleeping well as sleep deprivation may cause unwanted harm to the body especially during such stressful times.
Various studies also found that sleep deprivation reduces the body's ability to fight off a disease once infected and that those who sleep less than six hours a night or low sleep efficiency reported a higher rate of illnesses such as respiratory illness and head colds
Too much sleep such as more than 10 hours has also been linked to higher rates of illnesses and those with less than 6 hours show 4.5 times more likely to develop cold symptoms than those with more than 7 hours of sleep according to Aric Prather, a psychoneuroimmunologist at UCSF.
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