Sleep, a Necessity

Sleep is non-negotiable because its an essential part of human living. It is our support

machine and the mother nature has placed this on us to ensure immortality in some way. It is

important we reclaim our sleep and stop getting embarrassed about it. For sleep there is no rush

meaning that one cannot make choice to either sleep or not. It is unfortunate that sleeping too

much is associated with laziness but we all need to overcome. In so doing we will reconnect with

the elixir of life. Indeed, sleep has many pros as well as cons for people’s health.

Matt Walker is a director of Human Sleep Centre in Berkeley and a professor in

neuroscience and psychology in the University of California, Berkeley and he is an advocate for

more sleep as it improves the level of brain and body functionality. It is impossible to generate

sleep. “One cannot create sleep consciously and say that the sleep is off the table today. You

have to surrender to sleep and let it do all the amazing things for our health,” he says.

There are ramifications if we down our sleep. If people lack sleep there are consequences that

resurface. The shorter the sleep the shorter one’s life. Mother nature has placed essential

requirement for humans to sleep for about seven to nine hours for mortality. But humans come

along and try to change everything saying that they can train themselves to sleep for less than

seven hours. When a person fights biology they normally lose as consequences include sickness

and poor concentration.

A full night sleep is fantastic and it occurs in two shifts. The REM and non-REM. In the first

half of the night there is much of deep sleep and less REM sleep but as one pushes to the second

half of the night REM gets more pronounced. But lets face it everyone has skimp through sleep

once in a while and losing two hours in the eight that one sleeps affects REM. For instance, let’s
say that one has an early business meeting and instead of going to bed at 10 p.m. and waking at 6

a.m. one wakes up at 4 a.m.

Well, one has lost about 25% of sleep as you have taken away two hours from the eight-

hour routine. Otherwise, one might have lost 60-80% of REM sleep because it is during the

morning hours that REM works and one might affect the processes.

There are benefits of sleep such as improving learning and promotes recalling abilities.

During the non-REM sleep memories go through a massive change. It is crucial to note that one

requires enough sleep just before learning as the brain is like a dry sponge ready to absorb new

memories. Besides, we require sufficient sleep to after learning. It means that the new memories

acquired during the day are cemented and solidified into the neural parts of the brain.

Matt carried a simple hypothesis on pulling the all-nighter. Whereby, they had two

experimental groups. The first group was the sleep group while the other was the sleep

deprivation group. The deprived group were awake the whole night in the lab while the sleep

group got eight hours of slumber. The next day the two groups were placed under MRI to

measure the brain activity. Results for the individuals who slumbered the whole day showed a

healthy learning activity. On the other hand, those who were sleep-deprived did not have any

brain activity signal. It is as if the brain had shut down.

Unluckily, sleep is involuntary and again society has stigmatized it greatly. Sleep is a

fixed biological need and mother nature has devised a wonderful system to keep humanity mortal

for long. It is time we reclaim sleep without any embarrassment by educating and spreading

knowledge to ignorant people.

Reference