Myths about Sleep and Insomnia problems and remedy

MYTHS

Many myths and misconceptions have grown up about sleep, and it would be impossible to cover them all here. But it does seem to us to be Sleep important to discuss a few, still widely prevalent ones. Among them is idea that an hour of sleep before midnight is worth two hours after goodnight. The fact is that when you sleep is less important than that you do sleep. Some people prefer to work late and get up late; others prefer 10 get up early in the morning and go to sleep early at night. 

Sir William slur labeled the former "owls" and the latter "larks." It doesn't matter which you are except that if you know which you are and can arrange your life and work around the fact, you probably will be more effective and happier. When sleep takes place is not important; the proper amount of good sleep is what counts.

Another misconception: five or six hours, even just three or four, of sound sleep are worth more than eight hours of restless sleep. The fact I'; that while sound sleep is desirable, so is enough sleep. A third myth: sleep, to be good, must be consecutive; you need to get your seven or eight or nine hours at one time. Actually, there is no in- violate rule. If you feel well after sleeping three, four, or five hours and taking naps during the day, as Edison did, this is satisfactory for you though it may not be for someone else.

INSOMNIA

There is certainly no question about many people having problems with sleep. They can be very real problems but it is worth looking at some new insights sleep research provides on imaginary insomnia. Everyone has heard of arguments between husband and wife, one complaining that the night was sleepless, and the other that the spouse slept soundly and snored so much that the other was kept awake. In one experiment in a sleep laboratory, investigators worked with people who claimed they could not sleep at all. As part of the study, each insomniac was required to press a bedside button whenever during the night he heard a buzzer.

More often than not, when the buzzer was sounded, there was no response. And yet in the morning, the self-convinced insomniacs greeted investigators with their usual protest of never having slept a wink. That people who honestly believe they get no sleep at all do, indeed, has been demonstrated repeatedly in laboratories. Confusion between sleep and waking may arise because some people consistently walk to the time it takes them to fall asleep.

They may do so because it is possible to fail to distinguish between dreams and waking and because light sleep and waking may become intermixed in, leaving an impression of a long stretch of sleeplessness. It should be emphasized that imaginary insomnia is not a laughing. Even if the insomnia is only imaginary, sleep that is not refresh.

Stages of sleep and good health and research

 It is quite normal now for a sudden body spasm to on, perhaps awakening you for a fraction of a second. And then you move into stage 1 sleep; voltage from your brain is small, changing rapidly pulse is slowing, muscles relax. You enter stage 2 sleep as brain waves rapidly grow larger. If at this point you were to be awakened, you might well believe you had not been, sleep at all, though you have been for about 10 minutes. In about half an hour, you are in stage 3 sleep.

 Brain wave voltage is higher, the waves slower. You are breathing evenly, muscles relaxed, with temperature and blood pressure still falling. It would take a loud noise now to wake you. Soon you move into stage 4 sleep, with large slow brain waves. This is the very deep sleep that most people may think of as real sleep, but it is only a small fraction of the total.

After about 20 minutes of stage 4 sleeps, you start to move upward into lighter sleep. Now you may turn in bed or make some other movement; you are almost at the consciousness level. But instead of waking, your eyes move under closed lids, much as if you were watching a movie. Your heartbeat is now irregular and your blood pressure fluctuates. You are dreaming and if awakened at this point you can describe the dream in detail-but if you are not awakened then, you may or may not remember the dream in the morning. After about 10 minutes of REM or dream sleep, the cycle starts again. 

This, then, is the sleep process. There are still many unknowns. For example, there is no clear answer to the natural question: which sleep is better, deep or light? Nature apparently considers both necessary and oscillates between them. Also, there has long been a theory that sleep is needed in order to allow the body to get rid of "fatigue toxins." The idea is that during an active day, with constant contraction of muscles, certain chemicals are produced which are disposed of as waste.

But during activity the disposal rate is not sufficient to prevent some buildup of the materials and fatigue results. It has been thought, therefore, that as this fatigue linked 10 undisposed wastes builds up, sleep results. Yet, if this were the case, "toxins" should disappear during the night and we should leap out of in a state of exuberance in the morning. But this rarely happens. In .my case, with or without adequate explanations of why, we do adequate sleep is necessary. 

Without it, not only do we feel fatigued; we also feel emotionally drained, which Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington have demonstrated that the longest a person can go without sleep is about 240 hours, or 10 days. And volunteers who went through the experience found it much like torture. Even after 65 hours of sleeplessness, one volunteer was discovered in a washroom, frantically trying to wash "cobwebs" from his face, believing he was covered with them. Sleep is needed for emotional stability as well as physical refreshment. 

Sleep and research- EEG effects and benefits of sleep

Based upon distinct changes in the EEG and upon another phenomenon-the appearance of rapid eye movements (REM) at some points -sleep investigators divide sleep into a series of stages: In stage 1, light sleep begins. There are slow EEG waves, 4 to 6 cycles a second. In stage 2, medium deep sleep, slower waves appear and voltage increases. In stage 3, deeper sleep, voltage increases still more. And in stage 4, deepest sleep, very large slow waves of high voltage appear on the EEG. But when deepest sleep is reached, it is not maintained long.

Instead, there is a return to stage 1 sleep. And with the return to stage 1, REM or rapid eye movements appear. And the progression through the various stages occurs about every 90 minutes. Thus, however much you may think so upon full awakening in the morning, you never sleep through a night "like a log." In fact, many changes take place. There are muscle movements at various stages of sleep, less often during stage 1, quite often during moving from one stage to another. Actually, in stage 1, the heart beats faster, breathing quickens, muscles tend to relax, as if, some investigators suggest, you were settling down to dream much as you would settle down in your seat before the curtain goes up in the theater. It is in stage 1, with the appearance of REM that you dream. And you dream whether you remember the dreaming or not.

Investigators, after many thousands of studies, know enough to realize that, for whatever reason dreams are needed, all people dream just as all people sleep, and the dreams are not haphazard but appear at regular times in the sleeping cycle. The need for dreaming has been demonstrated by investigators who have awakened subjects from sleep every time REM began, depriving them of their dreaming periods, allowing them to sleep at other times. The result: impaired functioning, physical and psycho- logical.

The EEG has established that some of the older ideas of sleep, such as the popular notion that sleep is always deepest and soundest at the beginning of the night and lightest in the morning near awakening time, are false.  Work in the sleep laboratory, you can reconstruct what happens a night's sleep in this fashion: As you relax and close your eyes, pulse is steady and even, your body temperature gradually to [all, and your brain waves show an even frequency of about  second, called alpha rhythm. You are awake but relaxed, to move into sleep.

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.