If you are recovering from an injury or surgery, your recovery is about much more than what happens in the clinic. In fact, some of the most important work – and some of the most frustrating set-backs – can happen outside of the clinic. One of the best times for your body’s healing is overnight while you sleep, and one of the biggest disruptors to both healing and quality sleep is stress. Since both of these factors can play a significant role in your recovery, it’s important to do what you can to manage both.
Why Sleep Matters for Healing
Most people realize that sleep is an essential part of physical and mental health, but it can be especially important while your body is healing after an injury or surgery. Your body needs proper sleep to perform many of its vital functions, even when you’re healthy. Research suggests that not getting enough quality sleep puts even healthy people at greater risk for heart attacks, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other chronic health issues, as well as cognitive health issues like dementia.
The growing body of evidence linking poor sleep to poor health prompted the American Heart Association in 2022 to cite sleep duration as a critical component of “Life’s Essential 8” for optimizing heart and brain health1.
When it comes to healing and recovery, it is during the few hours of deep sleep that the body repairs and grows tissue, allowing for healing and restoration of damaged tissue. Good sleep allows the pituitary gland to release growth hormone to stimulate muscle and tissue repair and can also improve immune function. Sleep is also the time when our brains can clear away things they don’t need, allowing them to reset to a sort of “synaptic homeostasis” that allows our waking brain to perform more efficiently2.
The benefits of regular sleep for healing and general health are well-documented and not controversial. Better sleep means better and faster healing.
Stress: The Recovery Disrupter
While the evidence is overwhelming in terms of the benefits of adequate sleep for your body’s health, there is also very strong evidence of the negative impact of stress on the healing and recovery process. Stress is not only bad for your mental health but seems to have a demonstrable negative impact on your physical health as well.
Research has shown a strong correlation between chronic stress and slow healing, with one experiment suggesting that stress can slow healing time by 24%3. The negative impact of stress on healing has been experimentally demonstrated many times. This is likely partially due to an elevation in the body’s production of the hormone cortisol, which interferes with your body’s ability to produce anti-inflammatory cytokines, which are essential to healing.
When chronic stress inhibits your body’s ability to fight toxins and other foreign substances, and makes it less able to control inflammation, injuries are much slower to heal.
Add to these negative impacts the fact that stress also reduces your body’s ability to get a good night’s sleep, and it becomes obvious how too much stress can slow down your recovery and increase your risk of unnecessary complications.
What’s the Solution?
While there is no sure-fire way to ensure that you are always getting the exactly optimum amount of sleep and experiencing the least possible amount of stress, there are some things we can do to nudge ourselves in both of those directions.
Build Better Sleep Habits
Some suggestions to help improve your sleep habits include:
- Consistency: going to bed and waking at the same time every day.
- Your sleep environment: keeping it cool, dark, and quiet.
- Screen Time: reducing blue light before bed.
- Movement: light stretching or breathing exercises before sleep.
- Nutrition and hydration: avoiding late caffeine, heavy metals, and alcohol.
Following these tips can help you improve your sleep habits and overall health regardless of whether or not you are recovering from an injury or surgery.
Reduce Stress
This is obviously easier said than done, but a stress management plan can include:
- Simple relaxation techniques (breathing exercises, meditation, etc.).
- Journaling or setting aside “worry time” before bed.
- Gentle, predictable evening routines to wind down from the day.
- Daily activity/exercise.
Reducing stress can also be an important part of improving your sleep quality.
When to Seek Extra Help
While this article has been primarily a self-help or DIY guide, there are related situations in which it may be best to contact a medical professional, such as:
- Persistent pain that disrupts your sleep.
- Stress and anxiety overwhelming your daily life.
- Poor sleep lasting more than a couple of weeks.
Any of these can be indications that you should reach out to a professional of some kind, and do so sooner rather than later to find yourself on the fast-track to recovery.
The important connection between the mind and body is a big part of why we at Strive! treat people holistically, not just as a collection of symptoms. We want to support your overall well-being and have been doing so in Ocala and surrounding communities for more than 40 years. If you want to speak to a skilled professional physical therapist, you can set up a free consultation by calling us at 352.690.7777 or emailing us today.
Sources
- Lloyd-Jones, Donald M., et al. “Life’s Essential 8: Updating and Enhancing the American Heart Association’s Construct of Cardiovascular Health: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association.” Circulation, vol. 146, no. 5, 29 June 2022, www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001078, https://doi.org/10.1161/cir.0000000000001078.
- Wanjek,LiveScience, Christopher. “Sleep Shrinks the Brain–and That’s a Good Thing.” Scientific American, 3 Feb. 2017, www.scientificamerican.com/article/sleep-shrinks-the-brain-and-thats-a-good-thing/.
- Gouin, Jean-Philippe, and Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser. “The Impact of Psychological Stress on Wound Healing: Methods and Mechanisms.” Immunology and Allergy Clinics of North America, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 81–93, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052954/, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iac.2010.09.010.
