Let's take an excursion into the most mysterious area of human life. How does sleep affect our lives? Nightlife, sleep programming, mind clearing and more.
David Randall did a real "sleep research" and talked about how sleep affects our lives. A few curious facts from his book The Science of Sleep.
Two to one
For every two hours of wakefulness, there should be an hour of sleep, and the body senses when this proportion is violated. Each missed hour of rest is compensated by deeper sleep the next day. In this way, the body pays back its sleep debt.
First and second dream
In the Middle Ages, every day people fell asleep after sunset, and after midnight they woke up, stayed awake for about an hour, before falling asleep again before the morning. The night was divided into two segments - the first and the second dream. Such a schedule was commonplace, and everyone spent an hour without sleep in their own way: someone was praying, someone was reading, someone was thinking about dreams.
Already in the XX century, scientists found out that it is precisely such a night schedule that is the most useful and natural for the human body, since it most of all corresponds to biorhythms.
Teenage dream
The cause of teenage depression and aggression is sleep deprivation. During puberty, the circadian rhythms shift back three hours. It turns out that for teenagers to fall asleep at 10 o'clock in the evening is not just difficult, but biologically impossible.
Studies have shown that in adolescents, the body begins to produce melatonin around 11 pm, and this process continues even after dawn. Adults wake up when the level of this hormone is close to zero. And teenagers have to wake up at 8 in the morning, when there is still a lot of melatonin in the blood, so they think almost nothing and want only one thing - to go back to bed. Because of the shifted biorhythms, it is completely pointless to demand quick wits from teenagers in the first half of the day.
Cleansing the Mind
Dreams are an important outlet for our minds. Disturbing, unpleasant dreams are an ancient defense mechanism. We experience bad events in our dreams in order to be prepared for them in life. Sleep for the brain is a dress rehearsal.
On the eve of an important meeting, we dream of an attack - this is how the brain prepares for excitement, and there is nothing we can do about it. Students in their first week of school often dream of getting lost on the way to their class, and waiters dream of dropping trays or spilling wine on a visitor's shirt. Dreams are the most pessimistic scenarios that we replay in our head every day.
Sleeping pills against memory
All modern sleeping pills do not improve the quality of sleep or prolong sleep too much. Researchers from the United States have shown that patients who took sleeping pills fell asleep only twelve minutes faster than those who did not drink it, and overall slept only eleven minutes longer at night. But many continue to take sleeping pills, succumbing to the placebo effect. In addition, taking these drugs suppresses short-term memory. This explains why those who drank the medicine can toss and turn all night, but say in the morning that they slept well.
Sleep programming
Doctors believe dreams can be programmed: teach the brain to dream about certain objects and people, rewrite the stories that we tell ourselves every night. This method is called mental image rehearsal. It consists of two parts: first, a person describes a traumatic event that constantly dreams him in nightmares, and then chooses some kind of image or situation to replace. Before going to bed, for about ten minutes he imagines what kind of dream he would like to see, thus turning from a spectator into a director of a dream. For the front-line soldiers, such therapy helped no worse than drugs.
Night life
Every fifth inhabitant of the Earth has walked in a dream at least once in his life. In a dream, people do almost everything they do during the day: they communicate, eat, drive a car. In the early 1980s, two doctors at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center invited patients to sleep in laboratories and videotaped them. A window into the wonderful world opened before them. Lovely old men in the middle of the night turned into violent sailors - they swore roughly and beat their fists on the wall, jumped out of the second floor window, got into a car at night and drove more than fifteen kilometers to the house of relatives, tried to break someone's neck.
During sleep, the brain does not stop working. That is why ingenious solutions come in a dream. History knows many such cases. Nightly insights are not uncommon among scientists, writers and musicians.
One day Paul McCartney woke up at his girlfriend's house and realized that a melody was playing in his head. He rushed to the piano and played the tune of the future hit Yesterday. “I dreamed of the whole song,” McCartney told the biographer. - I could not believe it".
Sleep is not a respite from life, it is its third. The missing third part to answer the main question, what is the meaning of life.
All you need to do is just close your eyes.
