You cannot live without sleep. All the children will explain it to you. This is also how they are told that Julius Caesar would have killed Vercingetorix by preventing him from sleeping. Quite simply by stimulating it without stopping to disrupt a complex and well-regulated mechanism, that of cycles. A mechanism on which our entire sleep system is based.
A cycle lasts 40 ‘to 2 hours depending on the individual. Each of us has its own cycle, the duration of which is immutable, written in our brain. When we know that everyone absolutely needs 3 to 4 cycles per night on average, we understand why short sleepers need 2 to 3 hours of sleep with the same beneficial results as long sleepers for whom one night 7 to 8 hours is an essential minimum.
Between 2 cycles, we are completely awake, but we do not remember it, because this awakening usually lasts a few seconds. If it reaches the minute, that explains why, some mornings, we wake up with the feeling of having slept badly.
Each cycle is divided into several parts:
the first is that of falling asleep. A few minutes during which we are still highly woken up where for example the simple fact of turning off the television makes everything start again from zero;
the second part is much more serious, even if it is only an intermediate stage which allows, in a few tens of minutes, to reach what is called deep slow sleep. What popular common sense rightly calls restful sleep… during which, in fact, our body repairs itself.
Everything could end there when REM sleep occurs, like a thunderclap in the summer sky. Paradoxical because we continue to sleep while our brain panics, yet the distance from the being has never been so maximum. It is also the hardest moment to wake someone up. It is the sleep of psychic balance, where we dream. Because if without sleep we die, without dream we go crazy. For example, schizophrenics, those patients who have problems with reality, have little or no REM sleep.
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