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We all know that we cannot function without sleep. Sleep helps nourish your brain and body. Have you ever asked yourself, what happens when we sleep? We spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. It’s vital to our survival, but despite years of research, scientists still aren’t entirely sure why we do it.
There’s a lot we don’t know about sleep. Questions such as why we have sleep cycles, why we dream, and why people need sleep in the first place, scientists are still trying to find definitive answers. But one thing is certain. What happens when you sleep and What happens to your body when we sleep? We feel better physically and emotionally and perform better during the day when we sleep and dream.
Processes In Our Body During Sleep and Dream
Have you thought about what happens to your body when you sleep or what happens to your body when you dream? While you sleep and dream, your body does many important jobs. Sleep is essential for both physical and mental well-being. Let’s take a closer look at these.
1. Your brain sorts and processes the information of the day
What happens in the brain when you dream? Don’t think your brain is shutting down while you sleep. While you sleep, your brain is busy organizing and storing information for the next day. This process is especially important for forming long-lasting memories, as your brain gathers all the information it has collected throughout the day and saves it for later use.
2. Your cortisol level drops
Cortisol, often called the stress hormone, declines during the first few hours of sleep before peaking soon after waking up. This helps you feel stress-free when you wake up and increases your appetite.
3. Your immune system releases inflammation-fighting cytokines
While you sleep, your immune system releases a type of small protein called a cytokine. These cytokines assist your body fight inflammation, infection, and trauma when you’re sick or injured. Without enough sleep, your immune system may not be able to function optimally.
4. Brain functions are regulated
When you sleep, your brain’s waste removal system clears waste from the central nervous system. It removes the toxic by-products that accumulate throughout the day from your brain. This keeps your brain working well when you wake up. It affects many aspects of brain function, including sleep, learning, memory, and creativity. Even though your body is still while you sleep, your brain and imagination do not stop.
5. We experience sleep paralysis
When we begin to dream, a system in our brain activates and prevents our body from moving. We can think of this as a defense mechanism of our body to prevent our actions in dreams from happening physically. Hormones secreted from our body lead us to sleep and our nerves send signals to our spinal cord, causing our body to relax and then to a kind of paralysis.
As we see there are many answers for what happens to your brain when you sleep. We take notes of our dreams using dream diaries. Unlike traditional ways, the online dream diary gives you a great advantage by being with you every minute of every moment. By acquiring the habit of the Dreambook App, which is one of the online dream diaries, we can better discover what happens in our dreams while we sleep.