Sleep

I have been sleeping a lot for the past 2 days. Infact, I slept for more than 12 hours yesterday and 4 hours in the day itself today. How has the change come in me, I don’t know, but it has definitely made me conscious about the one body function we care very less about i.e. Sleep.

I read some things about sleep and thought, hey, this would be a cool topic to blog about. Sleep it seems is quite essential to body, but its exact functions are still a point of research. It can be divided into two stages based on eye movement – REM(Rapid Eye Movement) and NREM( Non-Rapid Eye Movement). REM Stage is also known as the dream stage while NREM is the so-called sound sleep without dreams. Both stages are essential to humans.

There is a term known as “sleep debt” which basically means that if you ward off sleeping for some time i.e. lets say you sleep for only 3 hours for one day, the next day it is mandatory for you to sleep for 13 hours to make up for the lost sleep previously. I find it true in my daily life, though I have found that the graph decreases as the amount of sleep missed increases. My personal graph for the two components is like this:

 

Sleep is thought to be very essential for restoring functions and growth of the body. Studies have shown less healing and growth in sleep-deprived rats. Apart from this, scientists have also shown that working memory which is responsible for reasoning, cognitive functioning, and remembering things (important for exams) is directly affected with sleep deprivation. In this case, the test subjects were human beings. Apart from this, it has been shown that people who are unable to sleep properly are weary most of the time and lack the ability to concentrate on the task at hand.

The sleep requirements for various age-groups are different. Adults need only 7-8 hours of sleep, adolescents nearly 9-10, elderly 8-10, pre-school children 12 hours and babies upto 18 hours of sleep! Guess, I should re-evaluate the category I fall in.

If you are having problems having sleep, then I think you might be doing one of the following:

1. Eating late at night
2. Watching TV/Computer till late(like me who is writing this post at around 1 AM)
3. Doing no exercise during the whole day.
4. Having tension/exam blues(Basically procrastinating your work till the last night to the submission).

Apart from all the scientific stuff, I think I have my own theory too about sleeping. I think we learn all the things we did during our dreams. In my experience, dreams during exams are mainly concerned of formulae, theories and nightmares involving giving the wrong exam. While, dreams after watching a movie, reading a gripping novel consist of you enacting a part of the story. For instance, after a 12 hour dose of Harry Potter novel(don’t remember the novel number), I had this brilliant dream of flying on a broomstick, and that was the most wonderful dream ever! Dreams after playing a sport are usually the best, once I had played Table Tennis for 2 hours before dropping off for sleep, and all I dreamt of was the TT Ball bouncing up and down. But after a hard physical day, I do not dream at all. Guess, my body feels the need for physical restoration higher than mental reinforcing of experiences. So, the graph for this will be like:

Would love to hear your experiences on sleep… Comments awaited.