It's no secret that sleep is a vital biological need of the body. It helps to restore human immunity, streamline the information received during wakefulness and support many more processes, which, by the way, have not been fully studied. We will talk more about what happens to a person during sleep.
Sleep stages
Our soul and body require rest, and the most indispensable in this regard is sleep. Having missed it for some reason, we will feel that we cannot move normally, as coordination has been disturbed, and memory and the ability to concentrate have noticeably weakened. If the lack of sleep becomes prolonged, then all these symptoms are fixed, intensified and, by the way, become irreversible. No wonder sleep deprivation has always been considered cruel torture.
In the average 8 hours a person has for a he althy night's rest, he has 5sleep cycles of up to 100 minutes. Moreover, each of them has two phases - slow and fast sleep. How do they flow?
To understand what happens during sleep, let's take a closer look at its stages.
Rapid sleep
A person who is tired or has not slept well the day before falls asleep at the slightest opportunity and immediately enters the phase of the so-called REM sleep, or paradoxical sleep.
He was named so because at this time, the sleeping electroencephalogram, heart rate and respiration rates are similar to those of a waking person, but almost all muscles (except for the diaphragm, muscles of the auditory ossicles, as well as holding the eyelids and moving the eyeball) completely lose their tone. That is, what happens during sleep in its fast (paradoxical) phase can be characterized as follows: the body is already sleeping, but the brain is still working. By the way, it is at this time that we see the most vivid and easily remembered dreams.
After 20 minutes from the start of falling asleep, a person enters the phase of slow sleep.
What happens during non-REM sleep
Slow-wave sleep, experts have found, accounts for 75% of all night rest. It is customary to consider several stages of this phase.
- Snooze. If you are he althy and go to bed on time, then it takes 5-10 minutes, during which you fall into a deeper sleep.
- Immersion in sleep. This step usually takes about 20 minutes. What happens in the body during sleep at this stage? Processcharacterized by a slowing of the heartbeat, a decrease in body temperature and the appearance on the EEG of the so-called "sleep spindles" (short bursts of brain activity with low amplitude), during which the person's consciousness is almost turned off.
- Deep sleep.
- The deepest delta sleep ever. Sleeping at this time is difficult to wake up. And even when he wakes up, he can not come to his senses for a long time. It is at this stage that manifestations of sleepwalking, enuresis, talking in a dream and nightmares are possible.
Then the person, as if starting to wake up, enters a state of REM sleep. Such phase changes occur throughout the rest, and if the last was sufficient, then, upon waking up, a person feels fresh, vigorous, renewed.
Physiological processes that occur during sleep
In the body of a sleeping person, despite his external immobility, relaxation and lack of reaction to stimuli (of course, if they are not very strong), many processes take place.
- A lot of moisture tends to evaporate through the skin at this time, resulting in little weight loss.
- Increases the production of a special protein - collagen, which, by the way, helps to strengthen blood vessels and restore skin elasticity. Apparently, movie and pop stars are not cunning when they say that a good 8-hour sleep helps them look good (although it’s worth clarifying: not immediately after a heavy dinner).
- Besides, a person grows in a dream (yes, yes, these are not inventions of mothers and grandmothers at all, notwho know how to put a restless child to bed), since his growth hormone at this time has the highest concentration in the blood.
- As a person sinks into sleep, almost all the muscles of the body relax one by one, except for those that keep the eyelids closed. They remain tense, and the eyeballs under them move, which, by the way, indicates the stage of deep slow sleep.
As you can see, the processes in the body during sleep are diverse - with their help, a kind of cleaning is carried out, preparing the body for daytime wakefulness.
Why the brain needs sleep
Probably everyone knows that our brain is not idle during sleep. During the period of night rest, he practically stops responding to external stimuli and concentrates on internal needs, performing the main task at that moment - sorting and processing daytime information and sending it for storage to the appropriate sections of the “territory entrusted to him.”
By the way, thanks to this process, everything that happens to the brain during sleep can be considered a kind of “general cleaning”. It helps us wake up in the morning with a different - clear and logical - look at problems that seemed insoluble yesterday. And schoolchildren and students have been using this for a long time, noting that the material that you study before going to bed is best remembered.
If a person has regular chronic sleep deprivation,the brain does not have enough time to structure and store the received information into "memory cells", which leads to complaints of fog in the head and severe memory impairment.
How brainwashing works
Asking the question: "What happens in the body during sleep?", the researchers found that such a state for the cells and tissues of the brain is akin to a kind of "cleansing enema." After all, toxins that enter the body with food or as a result of failures caused by stress settle not only in the gastrointestinal tract, liver or kidneys. They appear to accumulate in the brain fluid, both in the spine and in the cranium.
During sleep, the glial cells surrounding neurons shrivel up, shrinking in size, making the intercellular space larger and allowing more fluid to pass through. And she, in turn, flushes out toxins from nerve tissues, relieving us of the formation of protein plaques that would impede the transmission of signals between neurons and would contribute to the early development of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.
What does a person need to get enough sleep?
So, we discussed what happens in the body during sleep. To rest and to rise after it vigorous and renewed, each of us needs a different time. In total, people spend an average of five to ten hours a day sleeping. Somnologists (specialists who deal with the problems of sleep and its impact on human he alth) believe that it is still much more important for us not the quantity, but the quality of a night's rest.
It has been observed that people who sleep peacefully and rarelythose who change positions feel more alert and rested in the morning than those who toss and turn a lot. But why, having taken a seemingly comfortable position in bed, we nevertheless change our position? It turns out that our nocturnal body movements largely depend on external stimuli - flashes of light, noise, changes in air temperature, the movement of a spouse or child lying nearby, etc.
Somnologists believe that 70% of such movements have a bad effect on the quality of sleep, or rather, on its ability to move into a deep phase. And this just does not allow a person to fully sleep. Often we are forced to change our position by a hard surface, and a full stomach, and poor he alth, which means that when going to rest, we need to create the most comfortable conditions for ourselves.
About prophetic dreams
Somnologists, studying dreams, also understood the so-called "prophetic dreams" and came to the conclusion that in fact there is nothing mystical in them. Trying to solve them, you should not fantasize what happens to the soul during sleep. It is not she who wanders in the higher worlds, no - just in the phase of slow sleep, the human brain picks up the signals coming from the internal organs and transmits them in the form of vivid images. A person sees colored dreams, and can interpret them based on simple analogies.
For example, if you dream of rotten vegetables or raw meat (in a word, inedible foods), it means that there are problems with the digestive system. And terrible dreams that a person is suffocating or drowning, as a rule, indicate a violation of workrespiratory organs. A burning fire can be dreamed of with angina pectoris, since one of the symptoms of this pathology is just a burning sensation in the chest.
But flying in a dream is a clear sign of growth in children and positive development in adults.
The importance of sleep is difficult to overestimate
Everything that happens in the body during sleep haunts researchers. This much-needed and irreplaceable state of a person is studied by doctors, psychiatrists and even esotericists.
There are many myths and sensations around this topic, but you should not get too carried away with them, because sleep is, first of all, an opportunity to restore vitality and maintain he alth. Therefore, take care of your sleep and treat the described physiological process with respect!
