Appreciate sleep |
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Figuratively speaking, sleep is not a coin worth paying for a few extra hours of watching textbooks, watching TV, or doing research. This is not just about obvious harm to health. If you want, the "saved" hours of sleep are a mass of failed discoveries, inventions, and creative successes. Many probably know that D. Mendeleev saw his famous Periodic Table of Chemical Elements in a dream, and F. Kekule "groped" the formula of benzene, dozing off in an omnibus. We also know evidence that many bright lines came to A. Pushkin, V. Mayakovsky and other poets in a dream. For a long time, such facts were classified as unexplained phenomena. But, as studies of recent years have shown, the old popular proverb "The morning is wiser than the evening" is not without foundation. During sleep, our body really rests - the activity of many physiological processes decreases, pulse and respiration become less frequent. But the brain - it continues to work. For him, sleep is a kind of opportunity to "close the doors for guests and try to put things in order in his house." Many researchers today come to How much sleep do you need? What time to go to bed and get up? How to get the most out of your rest hours? There is no unambiguous answer to all these questions, because, as observations show, sleep patterns are a purely individual thing. It is only known for certain that it is more useful to sleep without waking up for several hours at once, and not to "gain" your norm in parts. As for the norm itself ... It is known, for example, that Goethe and Schiller needed five hours for a normal rest, Edison generally slept no more than two or three hours a day, and Balzac, on the contrary, liked to sleep ten hours in a row.
How do you determine your sleep rate? It is best to do this during vacation, when there is no need to subordinate the daily routine to the work schedule. And not in the first days, but, say, a week later, when the body is resting.Lie down and get up whenever you want: the average length of sleep for four to five days is your norm. In much the same way, you can determine the time when you should go to bed. If you notice that from day to day, even while sitting at an interesting performance or in front of the TV, you suddenly feel an irresistible desire to sleep, and after a while it disappears, then the time of the "attack" is the time of "lights out." Do not be surprised if this results in a figure that does not fit into the framework of usual ideas. As you know, all people are divided into "larks" and "owls", the first of which has the maximum activity in the morning hours, and the second - in the evening. If we could work in accordance with this feature of our body, then we would receive a considerable reserve for increasing labor efficiency.
Since the time when the researchers got at their disposal an encephalograph - a device for recording the biocurrents of the brain, it became clear that our sleep consists of alternating phases - the so-called "slow" and "REM" sleep. During the first, the biocurrents of the brain are like sea shafts, measured and impressive in amplitude. In this phase, the rhythms of the heart subside, breathing becomes more rare, the pharyngeal muscles relax. The hearing organs also work differently: a small muscle relaxes in the middle ear and interrupts the circuit that transmits sound vibrations. Therefore, in a dream, we often do not hear much of what is happening around us. "Rapid", or, in other words, "paradoxical" sleep is another matter. On the tape of the encephalograph, the picture is as if a person is awake: brain activity is increased, the heart is pounding, breathing becomes more frequent, movements of the eyeballs appear. It seems that the person is about to wake up, but in fact his dream at this moment is even deeper than before. "Paradoxical" sleep visits us several times during the night. Moreover, its first phases do not exceed five to six minutes, and as morning approaches, they increase to half an hour. By the way, it is during the "paradoxical" sleep that dreams come to us: wake the person up at this time - and he will tell their content. But, having woken up within a few minutes after the end of this phase, he no longer remembers anything from his dream. There are no people who never dream. There are only those who forget them, because they wake up later than "necessary."
N. Lazarev |
There is almost always not enough time: to go to the cinema, to properly prepare for the exam, to visit relatives ... And we try to save it. Most often - due to sleep, considering the hours given to him as an unproductive waste of time. But nature cannot be deceived: sleep either overcomes us or leaves us. So is it worth fighting sleep? How harmful are attempts to break his laws? How much and how should a person sleep?
Sometimes people perceive the tendency to prolonged sleep as evidence of some kind of ill-being in the body. Indeed, in many diseases, the need for sleep increases. But if a person needs, say, ten hours daily to rest, then he is no more painful than the one that needs six. True, the researchers have accumulated interesting statistics: it turned out that people who sleep six hours or less, most of them are more active, good administrators, overcome life difficulties quite easily. And, on the contrary, those who sleep for more than nine hours are emotionally much more vulnerable, they are prone to painful introspection, a deep experience of failure. But it is precisely among these people that the most creatively gifted, capable of finding non-standard solutions to problems, are more common.
And finally, the "quality" of sleep, its usefulness. Very often, getting out of bed, a person feels well rested, if only because joyful events await him. And, on the contrary, he complains that he did not get enough sleep, on the eve of a hard day. In principle, the "quality" of sleep largely depends on our lifestyle. The widespread belief that physical labor is a guarantee of good sleep is not always true. Both the docker and the director can equally suffer from insomnia if their bodies are "overloaded" during the day.
If the “paradoxical” phase for any reason “drops out” of the sleep process, then the person stops getting enough sleep. The latter also happens if one of its components drops out of "slow" sleep. This is the misfortune of older people: they can sleep a lot, but do not get any satisfaction from rest. Sleep pills do not help here: they are not able to give full sleep, since they usually extinguish one or another of its phases. In particular, barbiturates - drugs like nambutal and noxerone - inhibit "paradoxical" sleep, causing depression, mental lethargy. And derivatives of benzodezopine - eunoctin, valium, tosepam, seduxen - worsen "slow" sleep. So it's better to do without sleeping pills at all.
| Emotions and health | Past experiences with insomnia |
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