...Comp 1 Why do we sleep? Why do we sleep, how is it necessary? It is well known that you have to sleep. If you do not sleep you will die in a week or so. With that being said what does sleep do? We know it makes you feel alert and energized. Is it just evolution at work to keep us out of harm’s way at night? Is sleep our body’s way of conserving energy? Is it a way for our brains to imprint memories, and be creative? Does it clean our brain out? Do we actually need eight hours of sleep? Or is it a mix of a few reasons? Sleep is defiantly an important function in our bodies or we would not get so tired at night we just can’t stay awake. Our brains have a region devoted to letting us know when to sleep it is our biological clock. It knows when we should be awake and when we should sleep and you cannot change it knows that when the sun comes up its time to be awake and a few hours after dark it is time to sleep. But what does sleep do other than have you lay still and have dreams? Is evolution the reason? Are we safer by not hurting ourselves at night or worse getting preyed upon? That fact is debatable. By not moving around you won’t hurt yourself. And the predators will not find you as easily. But there are other things to worry about. What about natural disasters like fires, floods, tornados, and earth quakes? I would think being conscious would be more helpful with these situations even if you are not moving around. So I think we can rule out the evolutionary trait. Does...
Words: 831 - Pages: 4
...Effects of Sleep: How does sleep affect your academic performance? Sleep is an important part of our daily lives and the amount of sleep we receive each day affects a number of different parts in our lives which makes sleeping such a vital part of a person’s life. This is why I am so interested in this topic about how sleep affects your performance in school positively or negatively. “An area that researchers study is the impact that a lack of adequate sleep has on learning and memory. When we are sleep deprived, our focus, attention, and vigilance drift, making it more difficult to receive information” (Harvard University, 2008). Sleep plays such an important role in learning because if you are not getting a good amount a sleep, you won’t have the energy needed to possess the information that you are being taught because your brain didn’t receive the proper amount of rest to help it function at its best. “Without adequate sleep and rest, over-worked neurons can no longer function to coordinate information properly, and we lose our ability to access previously learned information” (Harvard University, 2008). Getting enough sleep every day is important because it affects your daily life in so many different ways that causes your academic performance to slip as well. The effect of sleep on academic performance affects college students the hardest. “Many students believe that it is a rite of passage to stay up all night during college and it’s kind of fun” (Yahalom, 2007). “But...
Words: 3666 - Pages: 15
...Dear sleep, I’m sorry I hated you when I was a kid, but now I can’t get enough of you. Please come back. Sincerely, me. This is just so me and every 4th year students and maybe even you. I have this story of mine that I would like to share. When I was in 2nd year high school, Ale and I were making a project in English – the Pop Up book. Ow, curse that project. We did the project before the day of the deadline. To really finish the book, I stayed at Ale’s house. We didn’t sleep because of that project. That night, we’ve just listened to Papa Jack’s love advices. When the morning comes, we looked haggard. We went to school together. We all looked so wasted up. That day is the day that I’ve been waiting for. Why? Because Divine, Paye, Kate along with the Konta Gapi teachers are going to perform that night. They’re going to perform the Ati Mr .and Ms. El Nido. I’ve always watched them from the start of their practice till the end that’s why I’m so excited. Dismissal. I’ve watched them practice for the last time. When I got home, I’ve told myself that I’m just going to take a nap for 20 minutes. But when I wake up, it’s already past 11 pm. I don’t even know how I end up on my bed. I looked at my phone and I wonder why I have so many text and calls from my friends. And I realized that I’ve missed the night that I’ve been waiting for. That night I cursed T. Jode’s project even the subject. But not the teacher, believe me. This story has something to do with sleep. We all know what...
Words: 1387 - Pages: 6
...relation, sleep patterns as in why do we need sleep, rhythms of sleep , sleep deprivation, sleep disorders, dreams and why do we dream. Sleep, as a human or animal we need to sleep because our body regenerates its self when it’s at rest. Humans spend at least one-third in an altered state of consciousness. When we are tired we crave to go to sleep just as if we are hungry we crave food. We can’t live without both. No human can stay p past twenty hours without feeling like they are about to crash. No one knows exactly why we need sleep but it plays and important part in restorative function. When humans are asleep there are rhythms of sleep. Circadian rhythm is a biological rhythm that last about 24 hours. There are 4 stages the sleeper enters when they fall asleep. Stage one is when the brain gives you the signal your muscles to relax. It also gives off that your heart is to beat slower and when that happens your temperature begins to drop. Stage 2 is a light sleep. You’re not fully asleep but you can be awakening. Stage 3 you are in a deeper sleep. Your blood pressure begins to get lower because your brain gives off that message. Even though the body temperature is getting lower the human that is asleep won’t notice. In this stage you can be woken but it won’t be as easy. Stage 4 the human is in a deepest sleep. If someone tried to waken this sleeper it would be very hard. If the sleeper awakens they will be very confused for a few minutes. Some may sleep walk or...
Words: 1941 - Pages: 8
...Why We Need More Sleep Don't you hate waking up early in the morning? Almost every weekday, high school students are waking up around six o'clock in the morning to get ready for school, some even earlier. It's not practical for high school classes to start at 7:44. It's just too early for teenage minds to function properly. Our school should start at least an hour later than that. With the extra hour, our attendance would improve, as well as our grades and attitudes. The facts are all there, so why shouldn't the hours change? On average in today’s society most teens don’t like going to school that early in the morning. To have to wake up so early when they only get about seven hours of sleep, to have students be coming into school at 7:30AM or maybe even earlier in some other schools, is not right. Students need to have time at night to get work done, not only schoolwork but also non-schoolwork. Needless to say, the school schedule for high school students needs to be changed and be made where they go in later. That way they get their work done and get enough sleep because without much sleep students will not be getting high grades. A health survey that the University Health Center administered showed them that one in four students say that lack of sleep has affected their academic performance in a bad way (“Sleep Rocks”). Sleep deprivation impairs students’ ability to be alert, pay attention, solve problems, cope with stress, and retain information. Academic performances on...
Words: 1642 - Pages: 7
...Background of the Study Sleep is a physiological need. It is a way to rest our body from fatigue. Hence, adequate sleep is a biological necessity, not a luxury, for the normal functioning of humans. Good mental and physical health depends on maintenance of adequate sleep. College experience is of great value in providing emerging adults with a structured environment in which they can gain knowledge, skills and independence to chart their own path, become successfully employed and contribute to society. For most students, the college environment is full of new living and social experiences, new freedom from parental supervision and new academic demands. In this situations, most often than not, adequate sleep is neglected. According to poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (2000) potential obstacle to maximizing success in college is the high prevalence of daytime sleepiness, sleep deprivation, sleep disturbances and irregular sleep schedules among college students. Daytime sleepiness is a major problem, exhibited by 50% of college students compared to 36% of adolescents and adults. At least 3 days a week, 60% of college students report that they are dragging, tired and sleepy. Sleep deprivation is defined as obtaining inadequate sleep to support adequate daytime alertness. How much sleep a young adult needs is known to be eight (8) hours. Most college students are sleep deprived, as 70.6% of students report obtaining less than 8 hours of sleep. Sleepiness is defined...
Words: 2460 - Pages: 10
...Importance of sleep. Sleep is very important and beneficial part of our lives. Sleep helps us to have a better quality of life, but nowadays not sleeping well has become part of the lives of many people. The sleep needed is between 7 to 9 hours, but some people get 6 hours or less. Sleep deficiency can be presented at any time of our lives, as adult people, teenagers and even in children. Sleeping well helps us physically and mentally. It is known that sleep plays an important role and helps us to improve our memory, health, learning and metabolism. Also sleep has an big impact on our life and it can bring a lot of consequences such as, long term diseases, car accidents, memory problems, shorter life, lower grades, deficiency at work, mad mood, poor performance exercise and extra activities. One of the consequences that lack of sleep brings is long term diseases. If we do not sleep what we need, we can increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and hypertension, metabolic problems such as, obesity and diabetes and emotional disorders such as, depression and bipolar disorder. When we deprive our bodies of sleep, it raises ghrelin which it is a hormone that regulates the need to eat. When we do not sleep, that hormone increases causing us want to eat more when we do not need it, so that is when obesity problems are presented. Also, sleeping decreases leptin which is another hormone that regulates the need to eat and when it decreases, we will have the need of eating...
Words: 2753 - Pages: 12
...Nadira Farha Extra Credit Paper Dr.Adviye Tolunay 11/25/14 “Sleep” Do you ever wonder why you don’t dream when you sleep? The truth is, if you are getting proper amounts of sleep in proper time periods, and not taking medications or using alcohol or illegal substances, you are dreaming. You just don’t remember them unless they wake you. Sleep has been determined like a state optimizes the consolidation of newly acquired information in memory. It depends on the specific conditions of learning and the timing of sleep. Sleep is divided into two states: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM), which involves slow wave sleep (SWS, stage 3 and 4) and the others is lighter sleep which occurs on stage 1 and 2. First, stage 1 When we are preparing to drift off, we go though Alpha and Theta, and have periods of dreaminess, almost like daydreaming, except we are beginning to fall asleep. These are interesting states, in that we experience them throughout the day and some people may have more of these waves than others. Those who practice meditation, or deep prayerfulness, often kind of “hang out” in Alpha. It’s a restful place. During this stage, it’s not unusual to experience strange and extremely vivid sensations or a feeling of falling followed by sudden muscle contractions. These are known as hypnogogic hallucinations. You may even feel like you are hearing someone call your...
Words: 812 - Pages: 4
...column). Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call. For sleep is rather extraordinary. If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way. If I also claimed that the condition was infectious, you would wish me luck in coping with such a terrible disease, and bid me a hasty farewell. Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal. We don’t see how strange sleep is because (nearly) everyone sleeps. Indeed, the situation of those who do not suffer from Tallis’s Daily Hallucinating Delusional Syndrome is awful. They have something...
Words: 1903 - Pages: 8
...Powerful Sleep – Secrets of the Inner Sleep Clock by Kacper M. Postawski, PowerfulSleep.com Copyright © 2004 PowerfulSleep.com All 1 Rights Reserved Powerful Sleep – Secrets of the Inner Sleep Clock by Kacper M. Postawski, PowerfulSleep.com Table of Contents Disclaimer: ________________________________________________________________5 Introduction _______________________________________________________________6 The Popular Myth about Sleeping ________________________________________________ 6 Recent “Eye Opening” Discoveries ________________________________________________ 7 How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? ____________________________________________ 7 The Mystery of Quality Sleep ____________________________________________________ 7 Chapter 1: Sleep Mechanics __________________________________________________9 What is Sleep, and Why Do We Sleep? __________________________________________9 Your Crash Course on Brain Waves ______________________________________________ 9 The 5 Stages of Sleep ___________________________________________________________ 9 Sleep Cycles __________________________________________________________________ 11 How Important is Deep Sleep? __________________________________________________ 13 How Important is REM Sleep? __________________________________________________ 13 So what is Quality Sleep?_______________________________________________________ 14 Chapter 2: The Inner Sleep Clock_____________________________________________15 ...
Words: 26531 - Pages: 107
... Importance of Sleep Sleep is a basic human need, like eating, drinking, and breathing. (TRICOLON) Sleep is similar to a stepping stone (ALLITERATION), in that it leads to good physical and mental health, but may be increasingly harder to recover if we fall down. (ANALOGY, EXPLETIVE) Sleep is our body’s way of to repairing and rejuvenating, by repairing tissue, by boosting muscle mass, by releasing important growth hormones, and by maintaining a strong immune system. (ALLITERATION, ANAPHORA, POLYSYNDETON, TRICOLON) If we are unsuccessful in meeting our body’s needs, we may become sleep deprived. Unfortunately, studies have indicated that this may be the case, and that up to 7 out of 10 children don’t get enough sleep, which can lead to physical problems, and mental problems, and productivity problems. (POLYSYNDETON, TRICOLON) Gandhi once said that “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” Even with our surprisingly small (ALLITERATION) amount of rest, right now, in the 21st century, (EXPLETIVE) everyone seems to get around just fine (MEIOSIS). Who needs to work with a clear mind? Who needs to stop relying on 10 cups of coffee?...
Words: 829 - Pages: 4
...Dragging yourself out of bed and forcing your body through another exhausting day; constantly being expected to be at your best performance. Not only that but you’re also expected to take on an abundance of homework and challenging courses. These are only a few out of several reasons why high school may be more challenging for students than previous years, such as middle school was. So why are we as students forced to run off of less and less sleep as the years go on when things only become more and more challenging for us? With all the hard work we’re expected to do daily, we should at least be given a half decent time to wake up. When we were in middle school, we had to wake up around the same time as high schoolers, now all of a sudden...
Words: 372 - Pages: 2
...Although there is still no satisfying answer to the question of why we sleep, rapid progress in the last several years suggests that this may soon change. Perhaps a better understanding of the function of sleep will also help to change attitudes about sleep at a societal level. The average person requires about eight hours of sleep per night, but many otherwise healthy people continually deprive themselves of adequate sleep with consequences that include fatigue, poor decision-making and increased risk of accidents. Although there is still no satisfying solution to the question of why we sleep, sleep is not a waste of time. Sleep is something that bodies need to do and sleep is a natural part of everybody's life, but many people know very little about how important it is, and some even try to get by with little sleep. It is important for the mind and body to function normally. Every individual is different on how much sleep they need. The younger they are the more sleep you need. As an individual get older he/she does not need as much sleep as he/she would when he/she were at a young age. Most adults need 7 to 8 hours to get the best sleep to function for the next day, during the sleeping hours the body goes into a deep sleep that helps the body be ready for the next day to give the energy that and individual will need. Other people need a nap during the day to function at their highest ability. The body will let your brain know when you are getting tired, and you will start...
Words: 402 - Pages: 2
...Sleep debt In students’ life, it is common to stay awake all night to study or to write a paper. Students themselves consider this as pressed by competing schedules. Actually, students who have to spend their time cramming for an exam are a result of Boomerang. They spend their time which supposed to study by playing computer games, dazing, or just browsing the internet. They mistakenly believe that by ignoring the need to sleep could eventually make up the time they have wasted previously, as result; they could do well on the exam next day. It is understandable to think in that way. Because students do make an effort to achieve their goal, which is a higher grade they desire. After preparing for 24 hours staying awake, students went to the classroom confidently. They believe that their efforts would pay back. However, the result could be unbelievable. There was once a research done by participants from 44 college students. It turns out that sleep-deprived participants performed significantly worse than the no deprived participants on the cognitive task. However, the sleep-deprived participants rated their concentration and effort higher than the nondeprived participants did (June, Amy 512). This was exactly the same as what students who spend their whole night preparing an exam think. They believe they put more effort compared to students who sleep well before the exam day. It indicates that college students are not aware of the extent, to which sleep deprivation negatively...
Words: 2663 - Pages: 11
...evolutionary theory is that animals sleep because it serves some adaptive function. The notion of the adaptive nature of sleep comes from the theory of evolution. The idea is that any behaviour that has continued into an animal’s gene pool must have been naturally selected because it has, in some way, aided the survival and reproduction of the animal that possesses that characteristic. One explanation of sleep that the evolutionary theory proposes is that it helps to conserve energy, particularly in warm blooded animals such as mammals which use a considerable amount of energy to maintain their body temperature - This especially true from animals with high metabolic rates such as mice. According to the theory, sleep provides a period of enforced inactivity to conserve energy which Webb explained as the Hibernation Theory of sleep. It is important when thinking about the function of sleep to distinguish between the two different types of sleep, core sleep and other types of sleep. The two main types of core sleep are slow wave sleep (SWS) and REM sleep. It is possible that they both serve a different purpose. Research has shown that energy is only conserved in NREM sleep because the brain is relatively active in REM sleep which suggests that only NREM sleep has evolved for energy conservation. More primitive animals such as reptiles only have NREM sleep, supporting the idea that NREM sleep evolved first for energy conservation and REM sleep evolved later to maintain brain activity...
Words: 1127 - Pages: 5
