Image credit: Ben Blennerhassett
Sleep is not just eight hours, allowing you to feel great in the morning, but a whole range of mechanisms that must follow a certain scenario. If the “scheme” for one reason or another fails, there is insomnia or waking during the night, which makes sleep less quality.
We are sorting out whether a full-fledged dream is important, as it is commonly believed, or regular shortfalls do not threaten you with anything other than a decrease in concentration.
Than insomnia is dangerous
Experts SciShow argue that lack of sleep can provoke a lot of health problems. In particular, the experiments allowed us to establish that, with regular sleep shortages, the wounds on the human body heal much more slowly than usual, and the immune system weakens, resulting in the body losing the ability to resist infections.
In addition, lack of sleep can make you more sensitive to pain. Mice deprived of sleep were more sensitive to pain caused by electric current than mice receiving the required amount of sleep. To this should be added and the fact that patients suffering from insomnia, more often report pain in the muscles and joints.
Sleep is of special importance for mental health of a person. In particular, it is during sleep that our brain unites memories, linking them with facts and skills obtained in the learning process. All these cognitive processes significantly improve memory, which means that the night before an important presentation or exam, you really need to sleep – the opposite can be counterproductive.
New research in this area shows that the brain can “self-clean” during sleep. In other words, when we sleep, it gets rid of the toxins that accumulate in the body during the day. Although this is a fairly recent discovery, it can affect the study of Alzheimer’s disease, which, according to the expert community, should be attributed to the accumulation of toxins in the brain.
10 facts about sleep that you did not know
We hope that you have no doubt that the dream is an extremely important “operation”. On this occasion, we collected ten interesting facts about the dream, which you may not have known.
1. A person is the only mammal that delays sleep with pleasure. It is appropriate to recall our favorite phrase in the morning: “Five more minutes …”
2. The higher you are, the higher the risk of sleep disorders. Scientists believe that this is due to lack of oxygen and concomitant changes in breathing. As a rule, in order to adapt to a new altitude (for example, during a holiday in the mountains), a person needs two to three weeks, but these indicators are individual in each case.
3. Divorced, widowed and lonely people often complain of insomnia.
4. Most healthy adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per day. Nevertheless, some people are able to function normally and after 6 hours of sleep. Others can not be at the peak of activity if they have slept less than 10 hours.
5. All of us feel excessive fatigue and drowsiness at the same time of the day: it’s about 2:00 pm.
6. Sleep is also important for a healthy lifestyle, like proper nutrition and regular exercise.
7. In accordance with the international classification of sleep disorders, people who work on shifts are at greater risk of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases. Moreover, scientists are absolutely sure that the human body can not adapt to shift work.
8. In total, newborns sleep from 14 to 17 hours a day with irregular periods of 2-3 hours, carried out without sleep.
Image credit: Ciprian Sam
9. Scientists still do not know – and probably will never know – animals have dreams, as they do in humans.
10. People who do not get enough sleep are prone to obesity. This is because their level naturally reduces the level of leptin, the hormone of sleep, which provokes overeating.