Ashok Gupta explains how sleep produces cytokines and maintains killer T cells, the immune system's virus-fighting tools. During sleep your body rejuvenates its defenses, making rest as critical as medicine, especially for healthcare workers on the pandemic frontlines.
Now, why is sleep so important for the immune system? Well, it seems that during sleep, the immune system rejuvenates itself and sleep is also a time when the body makes cytokines. Those are the chemical messengers that find the virus and coordinate powerful immune responses. Lack of sleep has also been shown to affect the ability of our killer T cells, which bind to viruses and destroy them. I truly believe that getting the right amount of sleep and the right quality of sleep is one of the best natural medicines for our immune systems. This is critical for caregivers and the healthcare workers especially. So many of them are getting the virus and getting ill because they're overworked and under rested SA.
