How Sleep Works

by Marshall Brain

Characteristics of Sleep

We all know how sleep looks, when we see someone sleeping, we recognize the following characteristics:

• If possible, the person will lie down to go to sleep.

If sitting up, the person may fall out of his or her chair as sleep deepens.

During sleep, the person occasionally rolls over or rearranges his or her body. This happens approximately once or twice an hour. This may be the body's way of making sure that no part of the body or skin has its circulation cut off for too long a period of time.

In addition to these outward signs, the heart slows down & the brain does some pretty funky things (we'll get to this later).

Sleep & the Brain

If you attach an electroencephalograph to a person's head, you can record the person's brainwave activity. An awake & relaxed person generates alpha waves, which are consistent oscillations at about 10 cycles per second.

A person generates beta waves, which are about twice as fast. During sleep, two slower patterns called theta waves & delta waves take over. Theta waves have oscillations in the range of 3.5 to 7 cycles per second & delta waves have oscillations of less than 3.5 cycles per second.

When You Miss Some Zzzzs...

One way to understand why we sleep is to look at what happens when we don't get enough:

• As you know if you've ever pulled an all-nighter, missing one night of sleep isn't fatal. A person will generally be irritable during the next day & will either slow down (become tired easily) or will be totally wired because of adrenalin.

• If a person misses 2 nights of sleep, it gets worse. Concentration is difficult & attention span falls by the wayside. Mistakes increase.

• After 3 days, a person will start to hallucinate & clear thinking is impossible. With continued wakefulness a person can lose grasp of reality. Rats forced to stay awake continuously will eventually die, proving that sleep is essential.

A person who gets just a few hours of sleep per night can experience many of the same problems over time.

Two other things are known to happen during sleep. Growth hormone in children is secreted during sleep & chemicals important to the immune system are secreted during sleep. You can become more prone to disease if you don't get enough sleep & a child's sleep can be stunted by sleep deprivation.

But the question remains - why do we need to sleep? Let's take a look at some of the possible reasons.

Why Sleep?

No one really knows why we sleep. But, there are all kinds of theories, including these:

Power Naps - What Most People Don't Know About Naps - By Kacper Postawski

One of the biggest questions I get asked all the time is - "Are naps good for you? Or bad? I've heard both sides of the story." I'd like to settle this argument once and for all right here, and reveal to you how you can properly manage your sleep to create an abundance of energy in your life, with LESS sleep.

Yes, naps are VERY good for you, IF you understand how the sleep system works, and you know how to nap PROPERLY.

In my "Powerful Sleep¨ course I teach people how to properly understand their sleep system, circadian rhythm, light exposure & how it affects their inner sleep system. While we can't get in this article, here's what is true:

Most people don't realize that sleep is actually quite a complex & fascinating inner system.

When we're sleeping, we're not just dead zombies off in an unknown universe. Your inner sleep system is a mechanism which follows specific time periods & stages to energize your body.

So how do you nap properly?

You take what are commonly referred to as "Power Naps," or what I usually refer to as "Stage 2 limited naps."

You see, when you sleep you go thru what are called "sleep stages,¨ there are 5 stages in total.

The first two stages, Stage 1 & 2 are your "Light Sleep." It's during this stage that we sleep "lightly," we're easily wakable & our circadian rhythm isn't altered enough to create a disturbance in the sleep system.

The Energizing effects of Stage 1 and 2 sleeps are very beneficial, just 10 minutes of sleeping in these stages can restore your energy to the point where you feel as if you slept for 8 hours.

However, why do most people do more HARM than GOOD to themselves by napping?

It's simple, they don't know about "deep sleep." Deep sleep comprises of all the other sleep stages. It's during deep sleep that your body undergoes a MASSIVE physiological change, your body temperature, heart rate, respiration drops.

Your blood vessels dilate & all the blood that is usually stored in your main organs during the day is channeled to your muscles to repair them.

If you enter deep sleep during the day, your circadian rhythm, and your "inner sleep clock" (see link below for details) will be altered & out of wack, often resulting in an in-balanced, weak sleep system & lower energy levels all together.

For an average person it takes about 45-90 minutes to enter "deep sleep," this is why for an effective nap you MUST keep your nap down to a MAXIMUM of 45 minutes.

Even 45 minutes is sometimes too much. The most energizing naps are usually 10 to 20 minutes long.

If your naps last too long, you'll enter deep sleep. Waking up from a deep sleep phase is more harmful to your sleep system & your energy levels than good!

You'll often feel lethargic, low on energy & in that "zombie" state of mind.

If you use naps properly, you can boost your energy levels drastically & lower your sleep time down drastically.

However, there are still 2 vital things you must know about napping in order to make them super effective during your day, so that you're capable of lowering your sleep & boosting your energy.

1. You must know exactly what the best time during the day is to take your nap.

2. You must know what to do AFTER your nap to speed up your body temperature rise.

Both these sleep secrets are exposed in the Powerful Sleep package, download it today at:
www.PowerfulSleep.com

Are You a Sleep Walking Zombie? - By Royane Real

Do you get enough sleep? Chances are you don’t. Many people living in modern industrial societies suffer from a chronic & worsening sleep deficit.

Until a few decades ago, most people lived lives so very different from ours that we would scarcely recognize them. Until fairly recently in human history the majority of people lived in small villages or on farms, not in big cities.

There were no electric lights. There weren’t any faxes or e-mails. There was no Internet & no television. Once the sun went down, most of the day’s activities came to an end.

People worked very hard physically & only a very small minority had what we would call “white collar” jobs. And most people, on average, slept 9 to 91/2 hours each night.

For most of us today, an average of 9 hours sleep each night is an impossible dream.

In our very busy schedules, something has to give & quite often the choice many of us are making is to cut back on our hours of sleep.

If you listen to, or read some of the popular current guides to success, you'll usually be instructed to work hard, play hard, study hard, be more outgoing & gain every advantage you can. The struggle to the top can be ruthless.

Why, even the struggle to stay where you are & not to lose your place can be ruthless.

Where do many of these success guides & gurus tell you to cut back?

Why, on your hours of sleep? They’ll tell you that sleeping more than 5 or 6 hours a night is a waste of time.

They’ll tell you that the world is moving ahead while you're dozing & that you’ll never catch up if you indulge your desire to sleep. If you snooze, you lose!

They’ll tell you that you don’t really need those extra 2 or 3 hours of sleep each night.

That it’s just a bad habit you’ve developed. That it’s self-indulgent. That a full night’s sleep is the booby prize for losers in the game of life.

Unfortunately, this advice goes against thousand of years of human biology.

It’s true that some of us really do need only 5 or six hours of sleep each night, but those people are in a minority.

Most of us require 7, 8, or even more hours of good quality sleep every night in order to function at our best intellectually, physically & emotionally.

In sleep deprivation experiments conducted on volunteers, it's been found that even a few days of sleep loss produce a marked negative effect on a person’s mental abilities.

It becomes much harder to focus mentally & to process information. Decisions take longer to make & are of poorer quality.

Learning & remembering new information becomes more difficult & it becomes harder to recall information that was previously learned. Creativity declines, while mistakes increase.

A person who hasn’t had enough restorative sleep will have difficulty handling technical machinery. In addition, lack of sleep causes emotional impairment & difficulty with mental processing.

As people become more sleep deprived, they may experience more depression & mood swings. Tempers flare more often & sleep deprived people become less cooperative with others.

Lack of sufficient sleep is believed to have contributed to many well-known accidents, such as:

• the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle
• the near meltdown at Three Mile Island 
• the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl

It's believed that lack of sleep contributed to poor decision making in each of these incidents, with disastrous results.

If you add to these examples the many hundreds of thousands of other accidents every year caused by sleep deprivation, it becomes clear that cutting back on our sleep may not really be the solution for greater productivity we're looking for.

If you're studying for important exams, you'll be better off getting sufficient sleep the night before, rather than spending the whole night desperately trying to cram more information into your head.

Remember that your brain uses its sleeping hours to process the information of the day & to consolidate new memories. Cutting back on sleep in order to study instead will interfere with this process.

How can you tell if you're getting enough sleep? The ideal amount varies from person to person & it isn't always the same.

Ask yourself: When you wake up, do you feel refreshed, or is your body longing for more sleep? Do you rely on a lot of coffee to get you thru the day?

Sleeplessness Clouds Moral Choices