Why sleep is your immunity super power
Sufficient sleep is thought to help support your immune functions in more ways than one. Sleep is thought to help support different branches of the immune system, including your innate and adaptive immunity, as well as helping to enhance your immune 'memory' affecting how you respond to repeat exposure to similar infections.
How does sleep improve your immunity?
Sleep has been found in research to help improve your immunity in the following ways:
1. It strengthens your innate immunity
Natural Killer Cells (NKC) are your immune system's secret assassins. They are ruthless and programmed to work tirelessly to hunt down any invading pathogens in order to eliminate them quickly before they have a chance to work on you and make you unwell.
However, sleeping less than is optimal can have a dramatic effect, in that getting just 4 hours sleep, as opposed to the recommended 8, could bring your NKC cells down to 70% of their normal level. And just to prove this theory, once sleep resumes to normal, the levels of NKC were found to go back up to normal, ready to take on another day! (1)
2. It helps improve adaptive immunity too
Adequate sleep is anti-inflammatory and your adaptive immunity is very receptive to inflammation, which is partly why again can be detrimental to immune functions too.
So, the amount of sleep can affect the activity of many of your immune cells, and therefore the degree of inflammation. Interestingly, genes can be switched on or off as a result of our environment, and whilst sleep is by no means the only contributing factor involved in this, some extraordinary research found that during 6 hours of sleep (which many of us would assume is quite suitable!), some vital genes influencing our immune functions were switched off. In contrast, genes which are associated with some negative outcomes, including promoting inflammation in the body, were switched on (2) – therefore, a double whammy which is unfortunately much more likely to result in us falling ill.
3. It helps support immune memory
Another fascinating fact is the link between sleep and memory consolidation. There is a strong link between sleep and our actual memories, in terms of our brain function, but did you know your immune system has a memory too? Another important aspect of our adaptive immunity. Sleep provides that downtime, when the more relaxing, parasympathetic branch of our nervous system is active and important restorative work can take place in different areas of our bodies including our immune or digestive systems.
It turns out it is some of the unique interactions of your immune system during sleep that helps to establish your immune system's ability to remember how to recognise, and then respond appropriately to threat such as antigens (i.e. the bacteria or viruses that can infect us and make us sick). (3)
What can be done to help?
Whilst prioritising sleep is something you might want to do straight away, supporting your immune functions more generally with the correct nutrients, is also a vital part of the story.
Especially in recent times, fuelling the body with the right nutrients has been considered crucial in offering protection. Our Immune Support product helps to do just that. It has just the right levels of zinc and vitamin C, 7.5mg and 5µg respectively, to help offer that extra support.
A.Vogel Immune Support Tablets with Vitamin D, Vitamin C and Zinc, 30 tablets
Product references:
1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6098779/
2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814608010868
Looking to support your immune system? Well, look no further!
