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| What is a dream |
What is a dream?
The outline of the article:
What is a dream?
Sleep fast and sleep slow. Phases of sleep.
Why should we sleep?
Night sleep and daytime sleep.
Sleep disturbances.
All life on Earth - animals, birds, insects and humans need a dream. When a person sleeps little and poorly, he has health problems, he becomes irritable, angry. From overwork and lack of sleep, a decrease in performance occurs and energy reserves are not replenished.
What is a dream?
One third of our lives we spend in a dream. Sleep is necessary for man just like water and food. A person can live without food for about a month, and without sleep a person cannot live even two weeks.
As a result of an experiment conducted in volunteers in the 60s of the last century, it turned out that a person deprived of sleep on the fifth day worsens vision, hearing, memory, there are visual and auditory hallucinations, and coordination disorders occur. Many of the people lost weight, although the subjects were heavily fed. Eight days later, the experiment was suspended. Dog experiments have shown that after two weeks the dogs, deprived of sleep, died.
Everyone is sleeping
What is a dream? Sleep is a natural physiological process that occurs in living beings - in humans and animals, in fish and birds, in insects. This is the relaxation of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex, this is a state when motor and mental activity decreases. Sleep is the rest of the whole organism.
If a person is not allowed to sleep, then the immune system is harmed and the body is exposed to harmful microorganisms and substances and becomes ill.
All over the world, studies are being conducted on how a person's state changes during sleep. It turns out that our life is divided into three phases - wakefulness, sleep without dreams and sleep with dreams. Dreams are necessary for our body. Dreams fulfill a protective function, as it were.
When we sleep, irritating signals from the external environment reach us, for example: stuffiness, heat, cold, lights turned on, soft music and sounds - they are included in our dreams (we dream of a hot desert or cold snow, a disco with bright lights and music and so on), but they do not wake us, and we continue to sleep.
It turned out that during sleep, a person has closed not only his eyes, but also his ears. The muscles that control the auditory ossicles are relaxed during sleep, and our ears do not pick up soft sounds. Therefore, we do not wake up from every rustle, only louder sounds interrupt our sleep.
Sleep fast and sleep slow. Phases of sleep.
To find out what happens to a person during sleep, an electroencephalograph is used for research. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG), brain wave oscillations are recorded. Brain waves have different indicators when waking, with a nap, with slow sleep and deep sleep.
Electroencephalograph (EEG)
It turns out that during sleep, the human brain continues to work, brain activity changes with a frequency of 1.5 hours and a person's sleep passes from 4 to 6 periods-phases.
Scientists have found that each person has two dreams - a slow sleep and a fast sleep. A quarter of the time a person sleeps in a fast sleep, the rest of the time in a slow sleep.
Fast sleep
During REM sleep, a person has rapid eye movement, facial muscles twitch, he moves his arms and legs, breathing quickens, blood pressure rises and the heartbeat changes. The brain is actively working during REM sleep. REM sleep lasts 10-20 minutes, replaced by slow sleep, and is repeated 4-5 times per night.
During REM sleep, a person sees dreams - bright, colorful, memorable. If you wake him at this moment, he will tell what he dreamed.
Fast sleep
The REM phase is simply necessary for our body - the brain processes information and stores it in memory for “long-term storage”. It is believed that during REM, brain development and nervous activity occur.
The REM phase is also called the “paradoxical phase”, since the brain is active at this time and the body is sleeping, or the phase of the BDG (Rapid Eye Movement).
Slow sleep
Most sleep occurs in slow sleep; slow sleep is divided into four phases.
During a slow sleep, dreams are also dreamed, but they are less vivid and most often we do not remember them. During a slow sleep, a person can talk in a dream, make various sounds, cry, laugh, sometimes walk (sleepwalking).
Sleep phases
The first phase-drowsiness in a healthy person lasts very little time about 5 minutes. During a nap, a person’s breathing and heartbeat slows down, pressure and body temperature decrease, eyeballs are motionless, and the brain continues its work, digests the information received during the day, refines thoughts and ideas, searches for answers to unresolved questions.
Then comes the second phase - about 20 minutes. Just as in the first phase, life processes slow down, the eyes are also motionless. At this time, a person has a sound sleep, and brain activity decreases.
The third phase is a deep sleep. Life processes also continue to slow down. During the third phase, a person has slow rotation of his closed eyes.
The fourth phase is characterized by a deeper, slower sleep. In a person, the heart beats more slowly, the respiratory rate and body temperature decrease, and the pressure decreases. The fourth phase lasts 20-30 minutes. It is believed that during the fourth phase of sleep, a person grows, his immune system is restored, damage to organs is eliminated.
The phases of slow sleep occur alternately, from the first to the fourth phase, then sleep returns to the second phase, followed by the phase of fast sleep. Such a sequence lasts all night from 4 to 6 times. During morning sleep, the fourth phase is skipped and the sequence of phases is as follows: the second phase is replaced by the third, then the second comes again, followed by the REM sleep phase, the time of the REM sleep phase is lengthened with each cycle.
Why should we sleep?
During the day a person manages to do a lot of things, by night his body gets tired and needs rest. The muscles that help the heart and blood vessels, also get tired, slow down their work. At the same time, the flow of blood to the organs decreases, and we experience fatigue and a desire to sleep.
A person must sleep in order to restore strength, to give rest to the strained muscles of the body. During sleep, not only strength is restored, but also, vital processes (blood circulation, blood pressure, blood sugar, immune and nervous systems, hormonal levels) are normalized.
The brain, like other organs, needs rest. Our brain is constantly at work. In the afternoon, he works hard, studies, assimilates new information, receives various impressions. And at night, when a person falls asleep, the brain also continues its work - processes all the information received during the day, ejects unnecessary information from the memory, and leaves important information, stores it in memory.
Why do we have to sleep
If a person sleeps little, the brain does not have time to do all his night work and relax, gain new strength. A man who has not slept feels broken in the morning, tired, his working capacity decreases, he is in a drowsy, depressed state all day, because his brain has not rested properly.
In order not to overwork the brain during the day, you need to alternate work, performing various tasks, and not do the same thing all day. And the brain needs to be trained (to become smarter) - to solve puzzles, examples, guess crosswords, memorize and learn poems, text and play logic games, chess, checkers.
Night sleep and daytime sleep.
When is it better to sleep - at night or in the afternoon? People who lead a nocturnal lifestyle (working on a night shift, nightly diving on the Internet, lovers of nightclubs and others who prefer to stay awake at night and sleep during the day) put their bodies at great risk. As mentioned above, we must sleep in order to restore strength and normalize the work of internal organs.
And it is night sleep that contributes to the pineal gland of the brain to produce the hormone melatonin, which regulates circadian rhythms. The maximum production of melatonin is observed at night - from midnight to 4 am.
Melatonin has antioxidant properties. It slows down the aging process and withering of the skin, helps fight seven types of cancer cells, improves the digestive tract and brain, the immune and endocrine systems, reduces anxiety and helps in controlling stress, regulates blood pressure and sleep frequency, helps to better adapt when changing time zones.
Lack of melatonin in the body leads to premature aging, to obesity, to colds and oncological, cardiovascular and other diseases. The benefits of night sleep are obvious.
Do you need a day's sleep? Many people believe that daytime sleep is only necessary for young children and those who work the night shift, but adults do not need daytime sleep. But scientists and doctors believe that a person just needs a short sleep during the day. It favorably affects the body, the cardiovascular system and reduces the occurrence of diseases of blood vessels and the heart, allows you to quickly restore strength.
What is the best time to sleep during the day? We all know that after a hearty lunch, we feel relaxed and sleepy. Why is this happening? The stomach is filled with food, so that more blood and oxygen enter the stomach to process it. And the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain decreases, the brain slows down and we want to sleep. According to studies, a person wants to sleep during a period when his body temperature drops. These periods at night from 3 hours to 5 in the morning and during the day from 13 to 15 hours. This is the best time for daytime sleep.
After a day's sleep, a person’s mental activity rises, and his working capacity increases. The body relaxes, stress is relieved, mood improves. As well as daytime rest improves memory, information is faster and easier to remember, imagination is enhanced and fresh ideas come to a person.
So if you can sleep a little during the day, use it. You will get a boost of energy and avoid overwork. But a lot of sleep is not recommended, you need to sleep no more than half an hour. If you sleep, then instead of freshness and vigor, lethargy and irritability, and even a headache, will come to you.
How much time is required for sleep depends on the individual and on environmental conditions. It’s enough for some people to sleep for 5-6 hours, and they are full of strength, for others 9 hours is not enough to restore strength and be awake. Your body will tell you how much sleep you need, each person has his own biological clock and rhythms, and you just need to listen to the needs of your body.
Sleep disturbances.
Everyone is faced with a problem such as sleep disturbance. Sometimes you can’t fall asleep for a long time, digesting all kinds of impressions in your head, you often wake up from the noise outside the window, from the loud sound of the working TV or from bright light, from heat and stuffiness, from the cold, and sometimes an empty stomach keeps you awake. From time to time, almost all people encounter this. But when this happens constantly, then such sleep disturbances should be considered as painful sleep disorders.
Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder. Insomnia per se is not a disease, but it can be a symptom of many diseases (endocrine, nervous, cardiovascular systems, brain). It can be caused by stress, alcohol and psychotropic drugs.
Sleep disorders
Narcolepsy is another disease related to sleep disorder. Excessive attacks of drowsiness can occur at any time of the day, anywhere (at work, at home, on the street, in a store), in any situation. As a rule, they do not last long (from several seconds to several minutes), but can be life threatening. A person can fall asleep while driving a car or crossing a road. Another symptom of narcolepsy is a sudden loss of muscle tone and a fall. At night the patient is haunted by nightmares, he often wakes up, auditory hallucinations do not give him sleep - he hears that someone is calling him, he thinks that insects, snakes, mice crawl through his body. Headaches, double vision, memory loss are often noted.
Sopor
Another known sleep disorder is lethargic sleep. A person who has fallen asleep with a lethargic sleep is often mistaken for a dead person. His breathing slows down, his pulse is not palpable, and his heart beats hardly. Causes of lethargic sleep can be brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, cardiovascular failure, lethargic encephalitis, and even severe mental shock.
A person who has persistent sleep disturbances needs a medical examination and treatment.
Have a good sleep and pleasant dreams!