Why we sleep - Resting, Renewal and Repair

While science and experience have long confirmed that sleep is essential to our physical and mental health, exciting new discoveries about the physiology and chemistry of sleep help to explain why sleep is peak time for maintenance and repair of our mind and body—most visibly, our skin.

Skin's Sleep Repair Cycle

We know that sleep restores energy supplies that have been depleted through the day’s activities. Sleep is also the time when the body does most of its repair work; tissues, such as the skin’s collagen and connective tissue, are rebuilt and restored. That’s why sleep is the ideal time for treatments that stimulate skin’s renewal and provide the body with the building blocks needed for repair.

Fighting Free Radicals While You Sleep

During sleep, the body also increases its rate of cell division and protein synthesis, prime markers for repair and restoration. Because these processes are part of an overall acceleration in your anabolic metabolism, sleep also serves as an opportunity to repair cell damage caused by free radicals released during the metabolic process. That’s why external application of antioxidants during sleep are exceptionally effective.

How Losing Sleep Damages Your Skin

Because lost sleep means lost cellular repair time, we can also lose tone in our muscles and skin when we lose sleep or sleep poorly. It is important to understand that sleep deprivation is not just the consequence of insomnia or too few hours devoted to sleep. Sleep deprivation also occurs when we have “shallow” sleep that is prone to frequent interruptions. With shallow sleep we are often in a near waking state and don’t get the deep “REM” sleep we need to boost cellular repair. Lack of sleep also leads to a degeneration in our immune response, a reduction in metabolism that leads to unwanted fat storage and an impairment to our endocrine system—which generates the hormones that regulate our entire body. These adverse changes are almost always visible on our vulnerable facial skin in the form of sallow tone, sagging, under-eye dark circles, dryness and even acne breakouts.

So what can you do to boost your skin's nightly repair cycle? Try Murad's Sleep Reform® Serum. It improves collagen production by 62% and multiplies collagen-building cells by 78%.  Buy it here.