The need for sleep

Although we are not yet sure of all the benefits sleep brings, several points are clear.

 

1) REM sleep is essential for emotional health. Dreaming has the function of ridding the emotional centres of the brain of unfulfilled emotional arousal from the previous day, thus leaving us more able to cope well with the next day's emotionally arousing incidents.

 

When we don't get enough REM sleep, we can often feel a bit 'hyperactive'. REM is suppressed by alcohol - you may have noticed the effect of being a bit 'wound up' the day after a heavy night's drinking. This is due, in part at least, to the fact that you have not dreamed enough. You can imagine what happens if we constantly under-dream. Click here for more information on dreaming. Anti-depressants also suppress REM sleep.

 

2) Slow wave sleep is essential for rejuvenation of physical processes. The exact ways in which this happens are as yet unclear, but we do know that the immune system benefits from a good night's sleep. A reduction in sleep of 2 hours per night has been shown to reduce the number of natural killer cells (disease fighters) by as much as 20%.

 

3) Extreme sleep deprivation can cause highly unpleasant and bizarre effects such as loss of balance, memory and even hallucinations. So we can see that a good night's sleep is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity.