(Markham Heid/ Everyday Health) — Your immune system — the body’s key defense against germs and other things that could make you sick — suffers when you don’t get enough sleep.
If you doubt it, consider the findings of a study published in 2015 in the journal Sleep.
Researchers tracked the sleep of 164 volunteers and then purposely exposed them to samples of rhinovirus (the common cold). The more sleep a person had gotten in the days before the exposure, the less likely they were to get sick, the study found. Those who averaged less than five hours of sleep per night were more than twice as likely to get sick as those who slept an average of seven hours or more.
“There’s a lot of truth to the idea that sleep is the best medicine,” says Filip Swirski, PhD, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who has studied the relationship between sleep and the immune system. (…)