Mysterious Things That Happen While You’re Sleeping
We have experienced a million times how we go to bed with a problem and as soon as we wake up, we magically have a solution. There is a reason the metaphor ‘sleep on it’ is used for things that need to be thought over. Sleeping is running away from a lot of things and letting our brain and body deal while we rest.
Our brain and body are not resting when we are sleeping. They are cleaning and fixing themselves out. It is a kind of repair workshop and is fuels us for the day to come.
Here is a list of things that happen when we fall asleep:
There are all sorts and levels of sleep. Not every sleep is a deep sleep and not every sleep makes you dream. Initially when you fall asleep, the sleep is light and it keeps progressing towards a deeper slumber. The first stage is the sort of sleep we get during our university lectures and suddenly wake up from. The second stage is deeper than before and the deepest is the third one. The third stage is where we end up dreaming and resting properly. Passing through all these stages takes about ninety minutes to one twenty minutes. We do not realize but we wake up in between as these cycles keep starting from stage one to the last one.
When we are in the deepest stage of our sleep, we are dreaming, and our brain is as awake as it is at day time. At this point, your brain is cleaning all the junk that I inside it. A study conducted in 2013 showed the results that our brain’s waste disposal system is at its peak when we are sleeping. The reason people end up getting diseases like Alzheimer’s is when the waste disposal system does not work properly.
Our brain is also making new memories and storing new stuff in it. People think we dream the things we experience in the day to process all that information and retain what was important. Our brain cells are usually being strengthened when we are sleeping if we are getting the right kind of sleep.
When you lie in your bed and are ready to sleep, everything in your body starts to slow down. From your heart beat to how you breathe, everything starts to slow down. Your muscles relax and your organs start to lie back as well. The intestines also slow down as its night and the liver starts to synthesize instead of detoxifying your body. The adrenaline in your body also reduces because you won’t really be needing your ‘fight or flight’ response in your sleep.
Along with all your body slowing down and resting, your blood pressure also drops. If you are an average healthy human being, it is very natural for your blood pressure to drop about five to seven points – considering you are getting a good night’s sleep.
Sleep experts have suggested that your room’s temperature should be cool when you plan to sleep. They do not suggest this because sweat makes ones get all sticky, but it is because the room copies what your body is doing. As sleep makes our temperature and blood pressure drop, already being a little cooled off will help a person in falling asleep easily. During the deepest stage of our sleep, our bodies might even drop a whole degree of temperature. If you were dropping temperature while being awake, you would shiver but that does not happen when a person is sleeping. And no one knows the reason behind it.
Another fact about deep sleep is that a person cannot move in this phase. One is practically paralyzed in this phase of sleep. The only two things that do not get paralyzed is your eyes and your breathing. The point of this is so you do not go around kicking your partner in bed. This sort of paralysis does not last more than twenty minutes and it slows your organs and body at the same time.
Growing here does not mean that you will be an inch taller by the time you wake up. By growing we mean, that your hormones and cells are growing when you are sleeping. Our development takes place when our body is resting and rejuvenating itself. A perfect example to explain this is seen in children who have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is when a child’s breathing stops while he/she is sleeping. Children with this issue usually have to get their tonsils removed so this problem goes away. And as soon as tonsils are removed, these children experience sudden growth.
Sleeping makes us hungry and want more calories. Ever wanted to have a big juicy burger after having a few hours of sleep? Yes! And this might lead you to gain weight.
We have heard all sorts of stories about strange things happening in a person’s sleep. But our luck has it that they are mostly not dangerous. Sleepwalking, talking or in some extreme cases driving is not unheard of. What is dangerous is waking these people up when they are sleep walking. There was a famous story about a man who would swim every night in his sleep, and his friend woke him up – and he drowned. He did not know how to swim in wakefulness. The reason behind why people end up doing these things in their sleep is due to either lack of sleep or medicine’s side effects.
Everyone has experienced jerking in their sleep or waking up because of a jerk. It usually feels like a person is falling in their dream and they tend to wake up. The reason behind this is yet to be found but is very common and is called a hypnic jerk.
There’s probably more, but we don’t know how much we don’t know.
Just like we do not understand how we solve our problems in our sleep, we also do not know many things about sleep. We do know that too much, or less of sleep can cause us to have health problems. Most of the research done is from lack of sleep and how it results in early deaths, heart problems, and even diabetes. There is very less research done on how too much sleep affects a person. But there is certainly a lot to know about what all happens when we are sleeping.
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Health