What Do We Know About Sleep?
An article based on human emotions and the basic requirement to sustain every day
Today is the 6th day of PWG and the topic we are going to uncover is about sleep. I have been thinking all day about sleep and how our human body approaches it. In this article, I would like to convey some serious thoughts about sleep. In between, we may need to go on for a virtual journey of sleep.
I would like to remember this quote by Stephen Chobosky. He is a novelist and he mentioned why we need to sleep in his book The Perks of Being a Wallflower,
“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”
The sensation of feeling that we don’t exist in this world by being present in it make us feel disconnected to the world that we live in. Sleep gives us the power to reset everything we have done and to start it over again. Have you ever imagined a scary part of sleep? How does it feel to you if I tell you to worry less and stop thinking things you are worried about right now? I will get back to this question as we go on. Sleeping is the manifest of the day you spend. It has got a lot of benefits. The scary thing about sleep is that we will be unconscious and completely disconnected from reality also we will be stuck in our world where our brain takes us to its journey which is inspired by the people you meet, situations you go through and your imagination thought flow.
George Carlin, while writing his book Brain Droppings says,
People say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. ‘For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.’
If we were unaware of what sleep is, it would be a science fiction to our kids. Would you like to take a drug that helps you not to sleep throughout your whole life? In 1913, French Scientist Henri Pieron authored a book entitled “Le probleme physiologique du sommeil,” which was the first text to examine sleep from a physiological perspective.
According to our ancient myths, there is a possibility of a person to stay awake his whole life without thinking about sleep or giving rest to his body. Sounds strange, right?
At first, when I heard this from scholars of different cultures, I amazed about this fact and researched it to know how our body works without sleep — sleep is so mandate thing for our organs to work silently every day. Let’s travel inside our body to know more and feel more.
Process of experiencing sleep:
When your heart pumps the blood it reaches all organs via the nervous system. Every cell in our body gets the blood as fuel to work. Sounds simple? let me go deeper: when you eat food or inhale air through your nose, your body gets the energy that it needs to produce minerals, hormones, and basic nutrients to function. Blood cells are produced in our bone-marrow and later it gets purified in Kidneys. All these phenomena happen when our body is resting. It’s an art of keeping our brain in hibernation mode. If we are awake, our brain normally gets a lot of information to process from our sensory organs.
While processing those prioritized requests, Our brain forgets to process the internal metabolism. This leaves our body to wait for the processor to respond to the Interrupt requests sent by our heart, lungs, kidneys to the brain. To understand the process of sleep better, I compared the human body to a normal computer by assuming a few variables.
- Brain = Processor, HDD, RAM
- Sensory Organs = Keyboard, Mouse (High priority input)
- Kidney, Heart, Stomach = Low priority input device
- Nerves = Buses
From the above perspective, when we are awake, the Input signals from sensory organs are high and they keep coming all the time. This makes out mind busy and persistent with the work based on high priority signals. I neglect the signals sent from other internal organs. Sensory organs having higher priority due to self-defense instincts and measures taken by our brain to keep our body-safe. It acts as an anti-virus program. The more we are awake, the more inputs our brain gets to respond — that response based on the processing made inside the brain. This mechanism in our body continues to have a huge impact on our organs making them feel tired. This impact stimulates our brain program to halt the interrupts. To do that, the brain suggests our body parts stay on rest so that it can work internally to keep our body healthy (execution of the scheduled routine program). Based on the processor’s request, our body falls asleep.
More we work in our daily lives, harder it gets for our brain and it requires cooler downtime to execute the task that our body needs. It is a two-way process. Organs generate the nutrients which our body needs as a fuel and that fuel is used to by our organs again to function. How can we control sleep and do the work without getting halted? It seems impossible. but we are in the journey of knowing how to control sleep. Think think think….
I mentioned above that our sensory organs need rest, not the Brain. The organs in our body, keep working even our sensory organs at rest. Sleeping is the process of resting our sensory organs rather than halting our internal organs. Brain, Heart, Kidney persistently work 24x7x365 to keep us alive. To control sleep, we must control our mind and keep it healthy. The more you know about yourself and keep feeding your brain with the right amount of power helps to use less energy. Lesser the energy your brain needs to process, sleep required to your body decreases. This condition can be attained by practicing meditation every day.
Meditation is exactly the opposite of sleep. Sleep halts the sensory organs but meditation helps you to calibrate the energy your body produces to work better. Sleep is inversely proportional to meditation. More you meditate lesser the sleep you require.
I want to share my personal experience here, I am a tech person who likes to code in late nights. I did work so many nights with less sleep for hard outcomes. I use to sleep just 3 hours per day. I use to work for a week like that and later next week my average sleep time would be at least 11 to 12 hours a day. I was not doing any meditation then. I continued to do this throughout my engineering. This often made me regret controlling sleep. As long as I resisted to sleep, my body requested forcefully more sleep time. Later, I started to do meditation every day and learned how the body works and the metabolism of producing required nutrients which helps us to stay awake.
When I started to meditate 10 mins a day, it was difficult to start with and let go of my thought flow for this activity. Slowly and gradually it is increased to 30mins. I started to notice a small change in me. The time my body was required to sleep decreased from 9 hours to 8 hours a day. As I progressed months, I started to increase my meditation time to 40 mins and a max of 60 mins. Once we attain the state of 60 mins meditation a day, your body needs only 6 hours of sleep a day to function normally and actively.
Our saints according to the myths, use to meditate 12 to 18 hours a day and that made them awake all their lives without actually sleeping. This process of hibernation is called an extreme meditation point. Once a person reaches this level, it is believed that our brain powers unlock to 40%. This is where we can speed faster than light and teleport ourselves anywhere. As we research more about sleep, we get to unlock an infinite number of mysteries.
Slowly, I am going to end the journey with some real facts about most successful people who sleeps only 5 hours a day but still they work like they had 10 hours of sleep. I explained in our journey about decreasing our sleep hours by gradually increasing the time to self-awareness. Every successful person meditates every day and it is the most important to escape from sleep and being productive.
Several researchers suggest us to get 8 1/2 hours of sleep to be productive without meditation. A person in the age between 18 and 64 needs a minimum of 7 hours of sleep according to the National Sleep Foundation. When we are sleeping, our body functions as restoration, memory processing, and dreaming. These three are like screensavers we put on our computers when it is idle and performing tasks in the background.
To finish my journey with you, I would like to end it with a piece of information I gathered in Wikipedia about sleep time, it says
Sleep timing depends greatly on hormonal signals from the circadian clock, or Process C, a complex neurochemical system which uses signals from an organism’s environment to recreate an internal day–night rhythm. Process C counteracts the homeostatic drive for sleep during the day (in diurnal animals) and augments it at night.
