What Happens While You’re Sleeping?
When you think of sleep, you probably picture a restful activity in which your body and brain are dormant. That’s certainly the case in some ways, but researchers are uncovering a lot of interesting things about what happens while you’re sleeping. They’re learning how important the process is to a person’s health and well-being and what may cause problems with it.
Whether you’re a kid, an adult or a senior, getting enough good-quality sleep is essential to your health. In fact, getting too little sleep is linked to a host of negative health consequences including mental and physical problems, a higher risk for obesity and diabetes, weaker immune systems, and even aging faster.
In some cases, these effects are the result of a combination of factors and may be influenced by both internal and external factors such as your daily schedule, light exposure, food choices and eating habits, and exercise levels. However, researchers are finding that many of these factors can be changed through lifestyle changes, such as maintaining a regular bedtime and wake time and reducing the use of electronic devices at bedtime.
The process of sleep is a complex one and involves many parts of the body, from the eyes to the heart to the immune system. The brain is also active and requires plenty of sleep to perform the many tasks it needs to do, such as sorting through memories, replacing chemicals and processing information. Researchers are still trying to understand what exactly happens in the brain during sleep and how it influences our behavior and emotions, but they’re beginning to see that it is far from a passive state.
As you go through the sleep cycle, your body temperature decreases, your muscles relax and brain waves slow down. In stages three and four, deep sleep starts, in which your eye movements cease and breathing and heart rate slow down further. During this phase, the body repairs tissue and muscle and replenishes energy. It’s during REM sleep that dreams occur. On a normal night, you’ll go through four or five cycles of this pattern.
Some of the body’s most important functions happen during sleep, including supporting healthy growth and development in babies, children and teens. In adults, the body’s major restorative functions, such as protein synthesis and cellular repair, are done during sleep. The body produces proteins called cytokines during sleep that promote healing, help fight infection and reduce inflammation. When you don’t get enough sleep, the production of these cytokines goes down.
All living organisms need sleep to survive, but not all of them do it the same way. For example, plants and most insects sleep during the day, while mammals and birds sleep at night. Animals sleep because they need to give their bodies and minds a break from the work of staying alive and growing. During sleep, they process the day’s events and restore energy. Humans need sleep to survive too, but we have an added reason: It helps keep us from forgetting what we learned.