LegendaryLife.com Blog

Sleep means different things to different people. In business books, more often then not, sleep is seen as a waste of time while for hippies if you where awake longer then you where asleep then you had a bad day.

What is sleep?

Sleep is generally seen as the period in which loss of consciousness occurs. Just about every living thing on this planet has some type of sleep, I have seen ants sleeping in the morning, I have seen fish sleeping in an aquarium and even sometimes a cat or two that where awake. Sleep is the natural process of rejuvenation that we ALL need for our survival. During sleep, our hearing, body movements and state of alert all decrease dramatically yet, our brains are even MORE active then during our waking hours. Our cells work overtime repairing and rebuilding the days damage while the general breakdown of our bodies structures slows down.

Why do we sleep?

Although the exact reason why we sleep is still not known, it is thought to be a mix of things. The first a processing of all the days memories, lessons and experiences into our brain for classification, sort of like what your computer does when it isn’t active… the hard drive speeds up much like our brain and an indexing mechanism kicks in. The second repairs and restoration from the days damage both externally (skin, limbs etc. ) and internally (organs and cells) on both a macro and microscopic level. The third reason I believe we sleep is because we suck at navigating our way through the night, our night vision isn’t very well developed so we cannot really hunt nor gather and simply looking at a camp fire for 10 hours straight till the lights get turned back on doesn’t make for a good use of time. Truth be told, our brains still have no clue that we live in a 24 hour global village.

To me, the reason for our lost of consciousness makes perfect logical sense. Extensive system wide renovations would probably be so painful that we wouldn’t ever do them, our brain needs dedicated processing power for indexing and our toes need protection from bashing into every tree at night.

What are the stages of sleep?

Sleep occurs in four stages, N1, N2, N3, V4 and R. First stage is called N1 which is essentially the gateway between consciousness and subconsciousness. Second stage is N2 in which conscious awareness of the environment around you goes away, you spend half of your night in this state. Third stage takes up about 5% of your total night and occurs right before you go deep into N4. N4 occurs right before R in which you loose all conscious awareness and the final stage R is when your dreaming.

What happens if you don’t sleep?

If you don’t sleep, irritability, loss of concentration, hallucinations and a host of other temporary mental disorders start to rear their head. There are people who have gone up to 11 days without sleep during experiments but generally, going without sleep isn’t a good idea unless your goal is to be the least productive human on Earth.

What affects sleeping patterns

Sleep is heavily influenced by both the mental and physical environment you find yourself in. Remember how for Christmas when you where a kid, you could either sleep right away or simply toss and turn all night… waiting for those Christmas presents to appear? Same thing occurs in adulthood, except it can be an upcoming exam, presentation or a new job that causes fantastic or insomnia. Stress, physical activity, diet and even general mood heavily influence the quantity and quality of sleep you will receive. From what I have read, the best way to get a good night sleep is to have a set routine you play out every night and every morning.

Why do we dream during sleep?

We may be able to figure out how to fly to the moon but ask humans to figure out sleep and all you get is mostly gobolygook. I believe dreams are simply a by-product of processing, or re-organization of the brain… remember earlier how I mentioned that I believe our brains are busy re-indexing our experiences into its archive while we sleep, well, I think some of those files fall out or get stacked… the result is dreams!

The Bottom Line

Sleep isn’t anything to skip out on, if you need 10 hours or 5 hours, then that is what you need but always remember, sleep is like a bank where regular deposits are required for a healthy account.

References:
Sleep Research Society http://www.sleepresearchsociety.org/
National Sleep Foundation http://www.worldsleepfoundation.com/
American academy of Sleep Medicine http://www.aasmnet.org/