South of the brain, we are also discovering that plentiful sleep makes your gut happier. Sleep’s role in redressing the balance of the body’s nervous system, especially its calming of the fight-or-flight sympathetic branch, improves the bacterial community known as your microbiome, which is located in your gut (also known as the enteric nervous system). As we learned about earlier, when you do not get enough sleep, and the body’s stress-related, fight-or-flight nervous system is revved up, this triggers an excess of circulating cortisol that cultivates “bad bacteria” to fester throughout your
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