Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Topic of the Day 3/23

Here we go, #31. Learn something new every day for 2 weeks – textbook style.


I decided to take in something that can be applied to my daily life so here we go.  
 
 Today's Lesson: Sleep - things that can cause, effect, and interfere with sleep.

According to an article on Yahoo! news today, an evening "second wind" is common in women who are sleep deprived.  It is caused by a surge of adrenaline and other hormones rushing to keep the body awake after a long day.  It can keep you awake for a bit, but afterwards, has a severe side effect of fatigue.

The article suggests taking a bath or reading a book - pick a relaxing activity that won't cause you to give in to your late night rush.

Other sleep depriving causes are light in the room, an erratic meal schedule, you menstrual cycle, your beauty routine, drinking late and high expectations. 
Read the whole article here.



A little more scientific, I decided to look into what actually causes us to fall asleep.  Since I seem to have such a hard time with this, maybe it'll help me tonight.  Because this is still a not-fully understood topic and a lot of the research is beyond my artistic field of understanding, I'm going to simplify this as best as I can.

Sleep is defined as a period of time when the mind loses some consciousness and an inactivity occurs in nearly all voluntary muscles.
There are 2 stages of sleep - Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non Rapid Eye Movement (NREM).  We transfer back and both between 4 and 6 times a night, but spend the majority of the night in NREM sleep - the deeper stage of sleep.

During sleep, our body's systems restore themselves - which is why we need to sleep so much when we're sick, and our memories and brain functions process the days events.

Dreaming usually occurs during REM sleep and is determined as basically a spitting of neurons through the brain, which explains why dreams can be so illogical. 

So basically, sleep is caused by the nervous system and a period of rest in our muscular system.  It is not fully understood what causes someone to sleep, but there are many theories as to what can assist in sleep and what can deter it.  

Ok, I don't think this is going to help me sleep much, but still, interesting non-the-less.

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