Adequate sleep influences one’s productivity, focus, and emotions throughout the day. It’s an important natural process that forces your body to take time off and focus on recharging. Between the many distractions, constantly stimulated brain, certain sleeping conditions, and carried-over stress lingering at the end of the day, a good night’s rest is hard to come across nowadays. Here are three sleep benefits of using red light therapy and how it helps you get your daily dose of beauty sleep.
Enhanced Muscle Relaxation
Relaxation puts you in a physical and mental meditative space, making it easy to drift off to your dreams. However, after a long, arduous day, relaxation is often hard to find. Any muscle aches and strains take over your brain’s focus, making it difficult to relax.
Red light wavelengths dilate blood vessels, increasing blood flow and the number of oxygen reaching your muscles. It also stimulates energy and protein production and improves your natural defense systems by providing antioxidants. The boosted blood flow and antioxidant production reduces inflammation and relieves muscle strain, enhancing relaxation and making it easier to fall into a cozy slumber.
Circadian Rhythm Regulation
The circadian rhythm refers to your body’s biological clock that influences physical, mental, and behavioral changes within a 24-hour cycle. At certain time periods, the circadian rhythm stimulates specific internal functions like peak energy production and melatonin generation. Any offsets in the timing and rhythm ruin the cycle affecting hunger, mood regulation, and sleep.
Your environment, especially your surrounding light, affects the timeliness of your circadian rhythm. Your brain associates light with daytime, increasing energy production. Darkness and dim lighting tell the brain it’s later in the day and time to wind down. With various external light influences—blue lights from devices and overhead lighting—your surroundings can easily trick your brain and throw it off rhythm.
Red light mimics natural light. Dimming or increasing the intensity of your red light device resets and regulates your circadian rhythm. Lower intensity makes it feel like early morning or afternoon time, and high intensity tricks your body into thinking it’s daytime.
Internal Energy Efficiency
Throughout the day, your body distributes its energy resource to multiple functional systems, from defense building to muscle fuel. Running low on healthy nutrients and energy boosters depletes your resources. Without an adequate energy supply, certain bodily functions shut down as the body prioritizes the energy resources for other internal systems.
Red light wavelengths penetrate through your skin and into the mitochondria of your cells—the home base for energy production. Consistently spending time lying down on your red light therapy mat and having frequent exposure to red light heightens your cell’s energy production. It produces a more efficient energy system, making sure you don’t have random spouts of energy surges before bed or feel drained during the day.
Red light therapy offers many sleeping benefits. It helps your body relax so you can easily reach that relaxed, meditative space. Red light also regulates your internal clock system, makes sure your body gives you melatonin at the right time, and improves the efficiency of your body’s energy usage and production. Spending time immersing yourself in the beneficial rays of red light waves leads to better, deeper, and more restful sleep.
