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How Sleep Helps Us

In: Science

Submitted By Exzile
Words 691
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The theory is that when you are cutting your sleep short that you are making your day harder than it has to be and with the proper sleep you could get things done more efficiently. Sleep is something that we all depend on and when we cut it short it leads us to feel tired, moody, and very sluggish. If you continue to get less sleep and it becomes chronic, it can lead to things like weight gain, memory loss, and impairment of motor skills. (Smith, Robinson, Segal 2012) It’s estimated that twelve and a half billion dollars in total damage due to car crashes caused by driver fatigue and fifteen hundred people have died from the fatigue caused by lack of sleep. (Arams)
The more sleep you miss out on can contribute to a thing called ‘Sleep debt.’ Just as any debt this is when you are missing out on a lot of sleep. Just how much sleep do we need? Adults need ideally eight to nine hours to feel fully rested and at our peak. (Schwartz, 2011) Teenagers need around eight to ten hours of sleep, and infants need fourteen to fifteen hours of sleep. (Smith, Robinson, Segal 2012) Three good tips to work towards paying off that sleep debt are: go to bed earlier, start winding down at least forty-five minutes before you turn out the light, and writing down what’s on your mind.
It’s not just the quantity of sleep that we get it’s also about the quality. There are two forms of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and Non-REM. (Chokroverty, 2010) There are three stages of Non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep accounts for around seventy-five to eighty percent of our sleep and each stage last approximately ninety to one hundred and ten minutes. (Chokroverty, 2010) REM sleep is around twenty to twenty-five percent of our sleep and of course is characterized by the rapid eye movements we have during this stage.
One thing that tends to stop people from sleeping is the actual pressure of

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