Sleep and Good health - Sleeping Pattern and Sleeping process

SLEEP

SLEEP IS fundamental to good health and yet, it would appear, many of us need a refresher course in sleeping. According to recent surveys, about half of all men and women in the United States have trouble sleeping at night, and about one fourth of the population use some form of sleeping medicine. Before considering how sound, healthy sleep may best be encouraged, let's get some basic understanding of this long-mysterious process which has come in for scientific exploration only in recent years.

How much sleep do you need? Have you ever really tested yourself over a period of time?

What is the nature of sleep?

Are sleeping patterns inborn or acquired habits?

What happens in sleep?

THE SLEEP PROCESS

As you have discovered when you do not get adequate sleep, sleep is necessary for both physical and psychological well-being. Even now, however, scientists are unable to explain why about one third of our lives must be spent in sleep and why in our sleep we dream. In trying to get sound insights into the mysteries of sleep, investigators in many sleep laboratories use volunteers to whose scalp they tape electrodes to detect tiny currents in the brain.

 Amplified many hundreds of thousands of times, the impulses are registered on graph paper as an electroencephalogram (EEG).

 In addition, equipment records pulse, eye movements, breathing, body movements, and muscle tensions while the in sleep, it is now known, is not a state of oblivion, of complete.

Rather, it is a progression of rhythmic cycles.  Equipment, scientists have been able to establish that sleep. That a newborn baby alternates between sleep and wakefulness at about hourly intervals; that gradually, as the child grows older, the cycles stretch out until eventually they becomes 90-minute cycles in adulthood.

 These 90-minute cycles are beyond conscious control. It used to be thought that we fall into deeper and deeper sleep during the night until we arrive at a turning point, and then sleep lightens progressively until we wake up. But it is now clear that this is not so. Instead, throughout the night, we shift from one gradation of sleep to another and are even awake several times during the night without necessarily remembering the wakefulness.