Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout your life. The way you feel while you are awake depends in part on what happens while you are sleeping. During sleep, your body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain your physical health.
In children and teens, sleep also helps support growth and development. Getting inadequate sleep over time can raise your risk for chronic (long-term) health problems. It can also affect how well you think, react, work, learn, and get along with others. Learn how sleep affects your heart and circulatory system.
This brochure describes the differences between the types of sleep needed to feel awake and to be healthy and offers tips for getting a good night’s sleep.
Respiratory and immune systems
During sleep, you breathe less often and less deeply and take in less oxygen. These changes can cause problems in people who have health problems such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Asthma symptoms are usually worse during early morning sleep. Likewise, breathing problems in people who have lung diseases such as COPD can become worse during sleep.
Sleep also affects different parts of your immune system, which become more active at different times of day. For example, when you sleep, a particular type of immune cell works harder. That is why people who do not sleep enough may be more likely to get colds and other infections.
💤 Get 7–9 hours of sleep
Heart and circulatory system
When you fall asleep and enter non-REM sleep, your blood pressure and heart rate fall. During sleep, your parasympathetic system controls your body, and your heart does not work as hard as it does when you are awake. During REM sleep and when waking, your sympathetic system is activated, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to the usual levels when you are awake and relaxed. A sharp increase in blood pressure and heart rate upon waking has been linked to angina, or chest pain, and heart attacks.
People who do not sleep enough or wake up often during the night may have a higher risk of:
Hormones and sleep
Your body makes different hormones at different times of day. This may be related to your sleep pattern or your circadian clocks. In the morning, your body releases hormones that promote alertness, such as cortisol, which helps you wake up. Other hormones have 24-hour patterns that vary throughout your life; for example, in children, the hormones that tell the glands to release testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone are made in pulses at night, and the pulses get bigger as puberty approaches.
