Sleep: A Waste Of Time To Sleep

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We spend a third of our lives sleeping. This is a fact that people have known and come to acknowledge. While some may say that it’s a waste of time to sleep, I disagree. Sleep to me is something special, it’s a part of my day where I can relax and recuperate, to prepare myself for tomorrow, the day after, and so on so forth. Some don’t realize that sleep is a significant factor in how we can stay physically and mentally healthy. True, we humans can be more productive if we didn’t sleep as much, but sleep is something necessary and beneficial in our lives. At night sleep takes over an individual and it begins performing specific functions that make sleep so significant to us. To begin with, sleep protects us, allowing us to know that when the …show more content…

I learned that in REM sleep an adult that sleeps eight hours really only gets approximately 1.5 hours of actual sleep. What was really shocking was the backstory of how REM sleep came to be. It is known that in 1952 a father had tested an electroencephalograph that he had repaired that day on his 8-year-old son during his sleep. The father, Aserinsky discovered that the deep zigzags produced by the machine on graph paper would correspond with periods of fast, jerky eye movements. As a result, this led Aserinsky to the discovery of REM sleep. With REM sleep came the four stages of non-REM sleep as well as alpha, beta, and delta waves, all of which contribute to the sensations we experience throughout our sleep. REM sleep tells a story, it can provide a lot of information about what an individual experiences while he/she is unconscious. REM sleep can tell when they have fallen asleep when they have begun dreaming, and it even explains the individual’s genital arousal. Anyway, a lot can be observed from a person’s multistage sleep cycle. I believe that it was through REM sleep that we were able to better understand the processes that went on within our body, as well as it’s restorative effect on …show more content…

Important to note, supporting our growth and development is another vital function of sleep. It is thanks to the sufficient amount of unhindered sleep that we are able to awaken refreshed the next morning, sustaining better moods, and performing with more efficiency and accuracy. In contrast, not receiving the right amount of sleep, however, will cause your body a lot of detrimental effects. Lack of sleep can result in short-term effects such as weight gain, memory loss, the inability to pay attention, and the increased risk of accidents and injury. “Sleep deprivation has consequences—difficulty studying, diminished productivity, tendency to make mistakes, irritability, fatigue,” noted Dement (1999, p. 231). On the other hand, sleep deprivation long-term effects may lead to a decrease in lifespan and disorders such as insomnia, narcolepsy, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Overall, in my opinion, it is essential to get at least 8 hours of unhindered sleep because to me it’s most certainly not worth risking so much for spending a couple of extra hours awake finishing a movie or playing

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