Wellness-Rest

The first thing God did after he created the world and everything on it was rest. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” (Gen. 2:2) There are surely many things He could have done instead, but He rested. He looked at His creation and rested. Surely it behooves us to follow His example? Throughout Scriptures God showed us our need for rest. It was so important to Him that He not only included it in the words He gave Moses, but devoted more time to its description than to any other commandment.

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

He gives us the gift of a day without work, not only for us but for those who work for us. He also gave His people feast days, for them to stop working and celebrate Him and each other. He knew, long before modern science rediscovered it, that rest and vacations are vital to maintaining physical and mental health.

Another kind of rest He gives us every day is sleep. He gives us nearly a third of each day to devote to rest and restoration of our minds and bodies. It is a princely gift, and to misuse it would be a shame.

We don’t entirely understand sleep, but we know that it’s necessary. If we don’t sleep we don’t function well and, eventually, our bodies will simply fall asleep with or without our permission. Sleep has two basic stages which we call Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-Rapid Eye Movement. These are named for the movements of our eyeballs during sleep. We know very little about either stage. We know that REM sleep is key to our sleep cycle; if we never reach the REM cycle of our sleep we will not wake up rested. Sleeping pills and alcohol can sometimes interfere with the stages of sleep, causing sleep deprivation. A person can sleep while under the influence of these drugs, but not actually gather much benefit from the sleep.

As discussed earlier in the section on sunlight, our levels of the hormone melatonin, the sleep hormone, increase when it gets dark. These continue to increase as it gets darker, and then begins to decrease when it begins getting lighter (around midnight.) This is one of the things which make us sleep at night. Another is what is called our circadian rhythm, which is an inner time keeper which controls inner temperature and certain enzymes in the body. All these things work together to make us creatures that sleep at night. There is some difference among people as to whether they tend to be more alert in the evenings or in the morning, but most healthy people do tend to sleep at night unless there’s an outside force affecting their system.

The average adult needs eight to nine hours of sleep every night, and it’s important that the sleep schedule remains relatively constant. Sleep at the “wrong” time in your cycle gives you much less benefit. Sleep deprivation can cause many mental and physical side effects including impaired motor skills and a decrease in cognitive performance.