Why Do We Need to Sleep? A Brief Guide

Sleep has really deep implications in the life of humans. A human being sleeps for many reasons. Rest is not the only reason. Sleep definitely brings rest to the body for a few hours. But there are many more vital body functions, and functions of the memory, which takes place only during sleep.

If a person won’t sleep, may such functions will not take place will get hampered in speed and quality, thereby interfering with health and wellbeing of the person. Hence, sleep is really essential. Only a quality sleep at a stretch can give life a healthy direction, without you having to invest anything but time and patience.

Why individuals sleep for extended hours?

Sleep has many important roles in keeping a human healthy. One of the main reasons is to make a memory permanent and allocate it into some segment of the brain. Whatever human listens, read, and learns through a day, are all stored in a kind of temporary memory. During the sleeping hours, the thoughts and experiences get stored into the permanent memory through a process. Hence sleep helps transform memories into a more solid and permanent form. Through a process called consolidation, the various small and short memories get arranged in a pattern and then get stored in a permanent way.

Besides this, sleep also helps in synthesizing or secreting all those hormones which are essential for the vital functioning and growth, and development of the human body. Other important things that sleep does in the body are repairing of tissues, healing of wounds, repairing of nerve cells, growth and development of the tissues, and all sort of daily cell renewal, restoration etc.

How much do you need to sleep?

The average adult needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep, while an adolescent needs 8 to 10 hours of sleep. But children need more sleep; they need 9 to 11 hours. And this is because they learn a lot more, and learn many new things each day compared to adults. Hence the amount of care you take of your brain through complete sleeping should be quite high.

Here are some important facts to learn about sleeping

The points below will help you realize why do we sleep, and what happens without sleep:

• Lack of sleep may make you irritable
• Lack of sleep alters with focus and concentration level.
• You stay in a good mood with energy throughout the day when you sleep well through a night.
• You feel hunger and digestion in the right way when you get adequate sleep.
• Without sleep, you risk yourself of many diseases like high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart diseases etc.
• Hunger gets minimized, and digestion and metabolism got bad and affected by low sleep.
• Many of the important hormones in the body do not get released or gets released in scare quantities due to inadequate sleep.

Sleep is regulated by the body just similar to breathing, eating, and drinking. Many theories have been developed already, and many are under research by scientists about why sleep is important.