Dalai Lama once said: Sleep is the best meditation, it’s a daily routine that we go through and take for granted, however, in this article, we will look into it from a different perspective by stating facts that you may or may not know about it, so you might change the way you think about your sleep for good, so let’s get into it.
An act with unknown biological purpose!
It might seem trivial to talk about something as common as sleep, yet scientists have no clue why do we sleep! but make no mistake, it is as essential as water and food to survival as our behaviour when we are awake is directly influenced by our sleep.
Mother Nature tells us when to sleep
Let’s not get into too many details here, but there are some facts we need to know about our sleep cycle, a wide variety of our mental, physical and behavioral activity is governed by what is known as Circadian rhythms (Meaning almost–a–day in Latin) rhythms, those circadian rhythms are produced by special proteins in our body known as Biological clocks, and all biological clocks are controlled by a Master clock which is a nerve bundle of around 20,000 nerve cells located at the bottom of your brain (Hypothalamus) and named suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), this for itself receives inputs from the eye, and in when it comes to sleeping patterns, natural light and warmth directly control how our sleep cycle is formed and that is why we said it is almost completely controlled by Nature!
Debatable measures of quality
The objective and subjective measures of a good night sleep are not agreed upon, however, there are some common observations that if fulfilled, you can say that you had a good sleep, some of them are:
Stages of Sleep:
Sleep has two distinctive phases Rapid Eye Movement phase or widely known as REM and non-Rapid Eye Movement phase or non-REM, the information below will help you distinguish between those stages:
Who can I improve my sleep?
Why do some people just love sleeping?
It might be something of a habit to find it extremely difficult to get up of a warm comfy bed, however, scientists have investigated this issue, studying the behaviour of people who are satisfied with less than 7 hours of sleep and they found a genetic mutation, namely in a gene known as “hDEC2” that causes people (And other animals as well) to be fully alert and functional with just 5 hours of sleep, so it might be the genes that are causing some people to love sleeping more than others.
Interesting fact and numbers
Make sure you listen to your body and give it the rest it needs!
Stay Positive, Stay healthy, Stay grateful!
References:
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Understanding-Sleep https://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx https://sleepfoundation.org/press-release/what-good-quality-sleep http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/so-why-do-some-people-need-such-little-sleep-1771873.htm https://harvardmagazine.com/2005/07/deep-into-sleep.html
