A good night’s rest is a major key to good physical and mental health. In fact, research suggests that the quality of sleep you experience is inextricably linked to your overall happiness.
When you are sleep deprived it can leave you feeling irritable and exhausted in the short term, but did you know it can also cause serious long-term health risks such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, higher stress levels, and depression.
Research also suggests that sleep can also play a causal role in the development and maintenance of different mental health problems including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. This means that poor quality sleep and sleep problems can cause changes to your mental health, and your existing mental health condition can also worsen.
In fact, sleep is directly connected to your emotions and happiness, not getting enough sleep skews your ability to regulate emotions. The quality of sleep that you get is important to the recovery of both your body and brain at night. As you sleep, your body cycles between two major sleep categories every 90 minutes:
- Quiet Sleep: You progress through the four stages of increasingly deep sleep. Your body temperature drops, muscles relax, and your heart rate and breathing slow. The deepest stage of quiet sleep produces physiological changes that help boost your immune system function.
- REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep: This is the stage of sleep in which you dream. You can experience an increase in temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing. REM sleep enhances learning and memory, but most importantly contributes to your emotional health.
Tips to Improve the Quality of Sleep for Good Mental Health
Meditation
The practice of meditation is sleep’s most natural partner. During meditation, you mirror the brain’s activity during the initial phase of non-REM (quiet) sleep, which is critical for basic brain restoration.
When you are awake, neurons fire intermittently in different parts of the brain, during non-REM sleep this variable becomes more unison meaning brain neurons synchronize so that they're firing en masse.
Meditation causes a similar effect on the brain, when you sit quietly and focus on breathing neurons synchronize within 10 seconds. Today many apps can help guide you in meditation, but even just the act of closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing will set your mind in the right direction.
A Mattress That Encourages Healthy Sleep
Essentia mattresses are the perfect sleep surface to encourage deep sleep cycles that truly help the brain slow down and kick into recovery and restoration mode. Essentia’s patented technologies create a mattress that actively cools through the night, allows for the elimination of negative space between the body and sleep surface which limits sleep interruptions, and allows for proper redistribution of body weight to allow for unobstructed blood flow meaning more oxygen traveling through the body.
The most important aspect of Essentia is that all mattresses and sleep products are made using only the highest quality natural and organic components in Essentia’s GOLS and GOTS certified organic factory.
This means there are no toxic flame retardants or synthetic chemicals found in traditional mattresses. The importance of this is that your body’s central nervous system can actually calm, as it is not spending the night fighting off external invisible toxins through the night as it would on a synthetic mattress.
Essentia mattresses are designed and built with a complete sleep environment in mind. Through this mindfulness, Essentia has been identified by leading independent institutions as the healthiest mattress for overall wellness as they score best in all categories important to the sleep environment.
This perfection in sleep wellness is what contributes to better sleep patterns which can have an important impact on stress and anxiety reduction and better memory management. The elements that make Essentia so unique are what counters depression and promote happiness.
