The road to health, the mystery of sleep.

      Sleeping occupies one third of a person’s life, which means that if a person wants to live until 90 years old, he has to spend 30 years of his life sleeping.  Sleep is an active process, sleep is the rest necessary to restore energy, there is a special center to manage sleep and wakefulness, sleep is just a change in the way the human brain works, so that energy is stored, which is conducive to the recovery of mental and physical strength; and proper sleep is the best rest, both to maintain the basis of health and physical strength, but also to achieve a high level of productivity. The nerve cells that originally received processing internal and external stimuli and responded with higher excitability interfere with each other by preventing stimulus connections that have not been deeply processed this is manifested as relief from fatigue. Poor sleep quality, on the other hand, refers to the phenomenon of insufficient shielding or insufficient sleep time to adequately digest stimulus connections. Drowsiness, on the other hand, is pathological over-sensitization for too long. These are all signs of inadequate neural control. During sleep, as active activity is diminished, the person’s strength is restored accordingly.  Sleep is often an unconscious and pleasant state, which usually occurs while lying in bed and during the night when we allow ourselves to rest. In contrast to the waking state, during sleep the person’s contact with the surroundings ceases, self-consciousness disappears, and the person no longer has control over what he or she says or does. In the sleep state, the muscles are relaxed, the nerve reflexes are weakened, the body temperature drops, the heart rate slows down, the blood pressure drops mildly, the metabolic rate slows down, and the peristalsis of the gastrointestinal tract is significantly weakened. At this time, it seems that a sleeping person is still and passive, but in reality it is not. If we give an EEG to a person during sleep, we will find that the electrical impulses issued by brain cells during sleep are not weaker than during awakening. This proves that the brain is not at rest. Just like a beehive at night, it looks like the bees have returned to the hive to rest, but in fact all the bees are busy all night long making honey.  Sleep is a spontaneous and reversible resting state that occurs periodically in higher vertebrates and is characterized by reduced responsiveness of the body to external stimuli and temporary interruption of consciousness. The activity of the normal human brain, like that of all higher vertebrate brains, is always in a state of alternating wakefulness and sleep. This alternation is one of the biorhythmic phenomena. When awake, the body is more sensitive to internal and external environmental stimuli, and can make purposeful and effective responses. During sleep, on the contrary, the body’s sensitivity to stimuli decreases, muscle tone decreases, reflex threshold increases, and although the autonomic nervous system maintains its functional regulation, all complex higher neural activities, such as learning, memory, logical thinking, etc., cannot be carried out, and only a small number of activities with special significance are retained, e.g., a mouse barking can wake up a sleeping cat; a crying baby can easily wake up its mother, etc. The above three characteristics help to distinguish sleep from other sleep-like states, for example, hibernation is mainly caused by the lowering of external environmental temperature, while coma and lethargy show the irreversibility of the sleep state. Hypnosis is a sleep-like state induced by suggestion, where the hypnotized person does not lose consciousness, but his or her behavior is governed by the hypnotist’s suggestion. It has been studied that dreams occur periodically during sleep with distinctive physiological representations, and it has been suggested that dreams are a third state independent of wakefulness and sleep.