It might seem obvious that all creatures sleep and many people do not even try to think of the reasons or the functions of sleeping patterns because sleeping is so natural things in life. However, there are many factors that are in connection with one’s sleeping style. Animals except human beings also have developed their sleeping patterns in the ways they can have better life. Since not all animals have same lifestyle, they do not sleep in and for the same time. Each of them has its own average sleeping time which matches its own living pattern. Three big factors that animal consider to determine howthey willsleep are based on how they conserve energy, their habitat temperature, and their stress from the external environment.
To begin with, the method which animals choose to maintain energy has a close relationship with the sleeping hours. Animals keep a certain amount of stamina to do demanding activity for a day by taking nutrition and using it suitably. Small animals usually sleep for a long time to efficiently conserve energy.Small animals usually have fast heartbeats that cause lots of energy for their tiny body when they are moving around, waken up. However, their heart rate goes down a bit when they are sleeping. Consequently, it is more efficient for smaller animals to choose sleeping as a way to regulate their energy rather than being active to find something to eat as an energy source. It can be shown by the fact that a bat sleeps for 19 hours a day and a squirrel sleeps for more than 15 hours a day.In contrast, animals with bulky body tend to sleep less and spend more time on eating. The reason why they choose to sleep less is that for the big animals, heart beating has only a trivial influence on theirenergy plan. Wha...
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...essed and as a result, they sleep longer in a peaceful atmosphere.One researcher found out that a slow moving sloth sleeps for less than 10 hours a day in wild but when it is in captivity, it sleeps more than 16 hours a day.
Some people tend to forget the significance of sleeping to all living organisms. However, animals place high priority on sleeping and checks many situations to sleep in best condition. They choose sleeping as a way to conserve energy efficiently, to survive in a severe weather conditions and they control the sleeping time according to their external environments. That means, it is an elaborate output of a long process of adaption to the external and internal environments. Moreover it can also be known that if the internal or external environments change, the animals’ sleeping style might also change so that they can adapt to that new conditions.
One reason that it’s important to have a full eight hours of sleep is so that you can have good health.Not sleeping good can have a higher risk of obesity. Obesity is a health problem which means that you are overweight. A way that would decrease the risk of a higher chance of having obesity is by falling and waking up at the same time everyday as scientist have proven. More sleep also helps with brain health. As we all know the brain is a big part of our whole body system. Which also not enough sleep can cause
Sleep—it's what divides the day and the night; the conscious and the subconscious; the aware and the unaware. It's image, then, is a powerful tool for polarizing such extremes. In his trilogy, The Oresteia, Aeschylus utilizes sleep imagery to divide between those who are aware and those who aren't. Though sleep's meaning changes throughout the plays, Clytaemestra is always able to use it to her aid. Her story accompanies a shift in a justice system that defines right and wrong. Throughout the trilogy, the meaning of sleep evolves from a clear division into a more indefinite one as the definition of right and wrong becomes increasingly ambiguous.
Another reason for the difficulty of sleep research is the pace of discovery. The field moves too fast for its own good. As a result, no comprehensive beginner’s text is available in the field of circadian rhythms. By the time...
Every person, animal, living creature has body functions that are controlled by internal cycles. Many of their functions are controlled differently than others. Most that function on circadian rhythms tend to be less active during the night and more active during the day. For example, many “species are remarkably diverse and flexible in their daily activity patterns, including a spectrum of diurnal, day-active, to nocturnal, night-active” (Phillips 2013). Birds fly, eat, etc. during the day and sleep at night. Then again there is the owl which is the opposite. They sleep during the day and perform actively during the night.
When most people think of sleep, they think of it as a relaxed but yet not a very important part of our daily lives. What most people don’t understand is although we are not up and moving around and getting tasks completed, our brains are still very active. Without sleep our bodies do not function correctly on a daily basis, and our mental state is at risk.
We live our entire life in two states, sleep and awake1. These two states are characterized by two distinct behaviors. For instance, the brain demonstrates a well-defined activity during non-REM sleep (nREM) that is different when we are awake. In the study of sleep by Huber et. al., the authors stated that sleep is in fact a global state2. It is unclear whether this statement means that sleep is a state of global behavioural inactivity or the state of the global nervous system. The notion that sleep is a global state of the nervous system served as basis for sleep researchers to search for a sleep switch. The discovery of the sleep switch, in return, provided evidence and enhanced the notion that sleep is a global state of the nervous system. The switch hypothesis developed from the fact that sleep can be initiated without fatigue and it is reversible1. It was hypothesized that there is something in the brain that has the ability to control the whole brain and initiate sleep. Studies have found a good candidate that demonstrated this ability3. They found a group of neurons in the Ventrolateral Preoptic (VLPO) nucleus. It was a good candidate because it was active during sleep, has neuronal output that can influence the wakefulness pathway, and lesion in the area followed reduce sleep3. The idea that there is something that can control the whole brain and result sleep state supports the idea that sleep is a global state of the nervous system.
Throughout the world, for centuries, parents and infants have engage in many different sleeping arrangements. In the Western World solitary sleeping is strongly encouraged by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Solitary sleeping, or sleeping in separate rooms and separate beds, is said to promote the infants independence and reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The AAP has even issued multiple warnings on the dangers of shared sleeping arrangements, citing concerns regarding the safety, wellbeing, and the independence of the child. While the health and safety of an infant is the top priority for all the Western idea of solitary sleeping does not consider the different cultural beliefs of others. Therefore, despite
studying the subject, the origins in the brain responsible for sleep are still not fully understood and thus, facilitate continual probes
Sleep is one of our basic needs to survive and to function in day to day operations, but not everyone needs the same amount of sleep. Some people can survive on very little sleep, i.e. five hours a night, and some people need a lot of sleep, to the extend that they are sleeping up to 10 to sometimes 15 hours a night (Nature, 2005). According to Wilson (2005) the general rule states that most people need from seven to eight hours of sleep. The deprivation of sleep in our society in continually increasing with the demands in society increasing work loads, the myth that a few hours of sleep is only necessary to function properly and that sleep is sometimes considered as killing time (Nature, 2005). Sometimes sleep deprivation is also caused by other situations like sleep disorders, i.e. sleep apnea, chronic insomnia or medical conditions such as stress (Wilson, 2005).
Another theory for why we sleep is based on the belief that sleep in some way serves to restore what is lost in the body while we are awake. Sleep provides an opportunity for the body to repair itself. In recent years, these ideas have gained support from evidence collected in human and animal studies. One of these studies have shown that animals deprived entirely of sleep lose all immune function and die in just a matter of weeks. This is further supported by findings that many of the major restorative functions in the body like muscle growth and repair, as well as bone growth mostly happen during
Sleeping is something that is an essential part of human nature and is a must in order for one to be a functional human being. Sleep is an idea that is accompanied by many wives’ tales, including the idea that one needs seven to eight hours of sleep each night and alcohol helps one fall asleep and sleep more soundly. One myth about sleep is that during sleep, one is in a state of nothingness. In truth, however, it has been discovered that during sleep the brain is active, variations in heartbeat and breathing occur, and the eyes and ears are active throughout the time of sleep. These activities during a person’s sleep are important because they help that person be more aware, awake, and alert during sleep.
Much of society mistakenly believes that each individual needs eight hours of sleep in order to have a full night’s rest. This is untrue because the amount of sleep you need has a large dependence on the many factors that influence healthy energy. Age is a large indicator of how much sleep is relevant to an individual. Studies done by Milner (2008), “Benefits of napping and an extended duration of recovery sleep on alertness and immune cells after acute sleep restriction” show that an adult needs nine hours a day in order to carry out work productively, feel rejuvenated, and maintain contented moods. In contrast, infants tend to need more time to rest their bodies even though they are less active. A young baby spends 2/3rds of their day
Important public policy issues have arisen in our modern 24-hour society, where it is crucial to weigh the value of sleep versus wakefulness. Scientific knowledge about sleep is currently insufficient to resolve the political and academic debates raging about how much and when people should sleep. These issues affect almost everybody, from the shift worker to the international traveler, from the physician to the policy maker, from the anthropologist to the student preparing for an exam.
The four stages of sleep are REM (rapid eye movement sleep), NREM1 (non-rem), NREM2, and NREM3. During the REM stage “your heart rate rises, your breathing becomes rapid and irregular, and every half-minute or so your eyes dart around in momentary burst of activity behind closed lids” (Myers, 2014, p. 96).
What research has told us is that sleep is relegated by an internal time clock or what the experts call the circadian cycle. First circadian comes from two Latin words circa: about and dia: day. All the various bodily function cycle that occur during the day are related to our circadian cycle. Since the time of Aristotle and Hippocrates these cycles have been recognized. Our sleep/wake cycles is one of the best known bodily functions to show circadian rhythms, and even our vital signs are directly linked to this cycle. As technology advances we gain more precise measurements, allowing researchers to recognize more circadian cycles which in turn teach us how our bodies work and function. On an interesting note it has been found that bone length is linked to and show a circadian cycle.