Well, it’s that time of the year again. It seems like every winter we have to fight off the same bugs and colds that came around the year before. Any advantage we can get to help stave off getting sick can help during the cold and flu season. One of the most convenient ways to increase your body’s immune capability is to focus on getting more and better quality sleep during winter.

Your immune system is your body’s first line of defence against illness. It’s separated into two types of defence. Innate and adaptive. While innate is a broader range of protection, adaptive is learned by your body over time and targeted towards a specific type of illness. Your immune system features leukocytes and white blood cells to identify and fend off foreign pathogens in your body.

Sleep plays an important part of your immune response by freeing up energy otherwise used for daily bodily tasks and directing it towards the immune system tasks. This allows your immune system to fight off infections effectively, but also to increase your immune systems memory (adaptive response) so that it’s able to recognise and destroy pathogens more robustly.  

In regards to vaccines, studies using sleep deprivation and sleep reduction have shown that vaccines are less effective in people who get less than 7 hours sleep directly after receiving a vaccine compared to those getting 7+ hours sleep. This demonstrates the importance of sleep in improving adaptive immunity in particular.

Interestingly, our sleep patterns while sick also change due to our immune system. More time is spent in Non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep (our deepest sleep) as this is when our metabolism is at it’s lowest, freeing up valuable energy for our immune system to function. One of the most important uses of this energy is to mount a fever response. Fever increases new waves of immune defence and also make your body more inhospitable to pathogens. Shivering is also an important part of fever as it allows our body to dissipate the build up of heat when needed and allow us to maintain a fever for longer. Our bodies aren’t able to shiver during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep due to muscle paralysis so this type of sleep is virtually removed when you’re sick.

So, what’s the point of all this information? It allows us to understand the need for a) a focus on more sleep when you’re sick in particular and b) a focus on better quality sleep and more quantity of sleep on a daily basis. We’ve covered in previous blogs what you can do to get better quality sleep using routines and healthy habits. Now we should look at getting more quantity of sleep, especially during winter when the sunlight hours are less and cold and flu season is at it’s peak.

Life is seasonal in nature so getting more sleep during winter, compared to summer is completely normal. Less daylight hours and the colder weather lean towards us naturally needing more sleep anyway so come up with a routine in winter that facilitates more sleep so you can give your immune system that all important boost and be at your best each and every day.

thrae.