What Happens When You Sleep?

It’s no secret that sleep is important; it affects our mood, our ability to focus, and getting enough sleep is crucial to our health. In fact we spend about a third of our lives sleeping (about 25 years in total!) so what is actually happening to our bodies when we are catching zzzz’s?! Keep reading to find out!

1. Everything slows down – Because your body doesn’t need to work as hard when you’re asleep, you take less breaths and your heart rate slows down. In fact most of your organs start to chill out. Your muscles begin to fully relax and even your intestines quieten down during the night.
2. Your body temperature drops – There is a reason they say it is better to sleep in a slightly cool room (other than because it’s hard to fall asleep when your body feels on fire!). This is because when you sleep your core temperature drops by about 1-2 degrees and also being in a cooler room will help you fall asleep in the first place. For other tips on how to fall sleep read here https://www.bodi.com.au/blogs/news/5-ways-to-fall-asleep-quicker.
3. You don’t sleep deeply the whole time - there are many different stages of sleep and you move through them in cycles. The deepest type of sleep is REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and this is where all of your crazy dreams come to life. Each cycle takes between 90-120 minutes to complete, so we don’t actually spend that much time in the deep sleep phase but the length of REM sleep gets longer in the wee hours of the morning.
4. Our brain cleans up – During deep sleep our brains are actually very active. Research has shown that our brains start to remove waste products (take out the trash) during the night, which helps prevent the build-up of plaque – the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Our brain also processes a lot of the information that we’ve received during the day, and it strengthens brain cells and connections that are important and removes the ones that aren’t.
5. Your body repairs itself – During sleep your body pumps out lots of hormones! These hormones have the job of repairing our bodies. For example they might repair muscle cells if you’ve had a workout, and repair your skin cells of daily exposure to sun and toxins. This is why we generally look better and “refreshed” in the morning. Beauty sleep is a real thing!
6. You twitch – Have you ever noticed your other half twitching next to you when you’re falling asleep? Twitching occurs during the light stages of sleep and it is perfectly normal. It can feel frustrating however when you feel like you’ve twitched yourself awake.

Not getting enough sleep is linked to an increased risk of lots of problems like obesity and heart disease. We don’t actually even know how sleep prevents these conditions occurring, but research shows that without enough sleep they occur more often. In a nutshell, getting enough sleep is super important, so don’t ever feel guilty for having a nap or heading to bed early!