7 Important Facts About Sleep You May Not Know About

Man is the only living being who can consciously refuse sleep. Today this ability is becoming a dangerous trend: we sacrifice sleep for an active life, but we ourselves do not become more active or healthier. Irina Danilina, the first Russian expert in the field of sleep culture and the creator of the premium bedding company Dreams and Secrets, talks about the most secret (and useful) aspects of sleep that will make you fall in love with it even more.

Fact # 1: Insomnia doesn't exist

The word itself contains a fatal mistake: a person cannot stand a complete lack of sleep. We sleep even during periods of intense stress: in short intervals, falling into a dark unconscious state. Scientists consider insomnia to be the disease of our generation. The high pace of life and scientific progress have led to the fact that we generally began to doubt the need for sleep.

Spend 8 hours in oblivion, when during this time you can redo so many interesting and necessary things? In playing with nature, stimulants come to the rescue of modern man: caffeine, sports, drugs that increase activity. All of them work for one single goal: to steal a little more time from sleep for the sake of an active life.

Fact # 2: Sleep gene “repairs” brain neurons

Sleep is at the genetic level of human nature. This is a relatively new but extremely important discovery of modern somnology. For the first time, science has come close to understanding that a night's rest does not just allow the brain to rest, and the body to relax. Sleep changes us at the cellular level.

The proof of this is the experiment of scientists from the Israeli University of Bar-Ilan. In tests with zebrafish, they found that during sleep, chromosomes trigger the regeneration of DNA molecules, repairing damaged neurons. Upon awakening, the active regeneration process was suspended.

Fact # 3: Detox your body while you sleep (and more)

During sleep, the brain analyzes messages from external receptors in internal organs. Collecting data on temperature, acidity, chemical reactions, it detects damage and starts the regeneration process in the part of the body that needs it most. But that's not all. During the night's rest, the brain actively gets rid of toxins. And not only in their own cortex: the "general cleaning" goes to the heart, lungs and blood vessels.

In this process, the glymphatic system is involved, which is the central channel for cleaning the nervous system, but the nuance is that it is included in the work only in sleep. The less we sleep, the more toxins are stored in the nerve cells, paralyzing the central nervous system. Did you want to detoxify by sipping on a smoothie?

Fact # 4: WHO has named insomnia as one of the main factors in cancer

The World Health Organization has officially recognized sleep deficiency as a carcinogenic factor that provokes the growth of cancer cells. The organization sounded the alarm after at the beginning of the 2000s it recorded an increase in the number of suicides and oncological diseases in the most developed countries of the United States, Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

WHO associated this with the rapid development of technologies that negatively affected the sleep and wakefulness of a person. The scale of the problem was so serious that the organization's doctors announced an epidemic of insomnia. Sleep is indeed a cure for cancer. This became known after scientists started talking about T-lymphocytes - "killer" cells that attack potentially dangerous particles that enter our body. After each sleepless night, the number of these cells in the human body drops by 70% and does not recover from the decision to “sleep for an hour in the afternoon” or “sleep off on the weekend”.

Fact # 5: Sleepless Brain Eats Itself

It sounds creepy, but medical research says that sleep deprivation can lead to the development of mental illness. During the night's rest, a number of cells remove toxic products from the brain, eliminating unnecessary connections between neurons and destroying damaged cells. But if sleep becomes scarce, then the kind cleaner cells turn into real maniacs.

Macrophages - the elements responsible for the destruction of damaged cells - enter the phase of excessive activity, removing not only unnecessary but also active connections. This puts you at risk for dementia, Alzheimer's and other brain-related diseases (see also: "Sleep Better: Why Deep Sleep is Important and How to Improve It").

Fact # 6: Sleep is a great nutritionist

Even if you fall asleep in deathly fatigue, literally collapsing on the bed, this does not mean that the whole night will pass in sleep paralysis. Sleep is a kind of physical activity. Only with breathing per night, a person loses up to 800 ml of water. In a dream, we constantly move - we change our position during REM sleep (somewhere 25-30 times a night), we experience short muscle contractions and roll our eyes. Some lucky ones even manage to lose a whole kilogram of weight overnight. Sleep is generally an excellent nutritionist: night rest helps to stabilize blood sugar levels and form adequate eating behavior.

Fact # 7: Insomnia is an epidemic of our century

An unhealthy trend towards less sleep has led to the emergence of organizations around the world that are responsible for creating a culture of nightlife. In the USA it is the National Sleep Foundation, founded in 1990, in Russia - the Russian Society of Somnologists. Both organizations are engaged in the study of the nature of sleep and cognitive therapy for insomnia, under their auspices, sleep centers are opening. You can turn there for help if you suffer from acute or chronic insomnia, as well as from concomitant disorders - snoring, bruxism, somnambulism (read also: "10 causes of insomnia and ways to overcome it").

PS:

Sleep is the main condition for daytime efficiency. If you did not sleep well at night, then the next day, at best, you will be able to weed the beds or do any other monotonous physical work that does not affect the brain. There can be no question of any intellectual activity. And we don't need to understand the intricacies of neuroanatomy to be sure: spending precious hours of sleep on TV shows and social media is not just stupid, but also dangerous. Remember: all positive changes in a person's life begin with conscious self-love, and a good morning begins at night.