Have you ever found yourself trying hard to fall asleep on a restless night, already knowing the exhaustion is going to settle in the next day? If it’s a ‘yes’, then you know that no amount of caffeine will be able to help you shake off the lethargy the following day.

This is precisely why you need a good sleep as it can affect your energy levels throughout the day, and in order to do that, you need to understand why it affects the way your body functions. 

One sleep cycle consists of four different stages categorized as REM (rapid eye movement) and three non-REM cycles. While REM sleep is often dubbed as dreaming sleep, non-REM stages are dubbed as quiet sleep.

The last stage in a sleep cycle is known as deep sleep, where your body repairs itself and recharges its ATP (energy molecules). If this stage of your cycle is disrupted by you waking up, chances are that you’ll feel more tired and less alert during the day.

This can lead to feeling a drop in energy and harder to concentrate on important, and sometimes even simpler, tasks throughout the day. You may even feel an onset of daytime sleepiness, slower thinking and reaction time, crankiness and unusual changes in your mood. Studies also show that when you’re sleep-deprived, your body passes through the other stages quickly and instead spends a longer period of time in deep-sleep to help gain back your energy.

While a deep sleep helps your body heal and renew faster, REM helps your mind sort the important pieces of information from the irrelevant ones. So, a good night’s sleep not only helps you stay energized the next day, but also maintains and stores the previous day’s productivity for the long term. Studies show that getting enough REM sleep might also help you preserve memory and cognitive function. Of course, sleep alone does not work as a remedy, so if you feel a lack of energy despite getting enough sleep, then you may want to look at other aspects of your life such as exercise, stress and diet.

You can also try a multivitamin tablet if you’re not getting the necessary nutrients via diet; you can consider HealthOK to help you with 24-hour energy. The combination of taurine and natural ginseng makes our supplement unique, thus helping you stay active all day long.

However, it’s important to remember that there is no replacement for sleep. So if you find yourself having trouble falling asleep most nights, you may want to consult your general physician to check if it might be due to an underlying issue.