Michael Langston

Given the critical importance of sleep for our overall health as well as for brain health, we need to adopt daily habits that allow us to get enough sleep. And we don’t need to deprive children of sleep by starting school at an inappropriately early time.

Every process in the brain and every system in the body benefits from sleep and is also greatly impaired by too little sleep. Sleep is as essential to the brain and body as eating and breathing since you will eventually get sick and die from a lack of it.

Many use alcohol as a sleep aid since it helps to put you to sleep, but this is sedation, not natural, healthy sleep. It also interferes with sleep quality by fragmenting sleep and suppressing REM sleep. This is a very compelling reason to avoid using it.

If you have a health problem that needs to be corrected, one of the first things you should think about, in addition to diet, is correcting your sleep. We often forget how vitally important sleep is and what a profound influence it can have on our health.

Prescription sleep medications may seem to provide a solution for insomnia, but over the long term these drugs will make sleep problems and health in general worse, not better. The so-called sleep they provide is sedation, not natural and healthful sleep.