The value of sleep

For most people the title of the post seems self explainable.Everyone has experienced the nice feeling that a good night or day sleep can give.It is easy to see that after a good sleep your mood and the feeling of pure body energy(you know what I mean) is at the highest level you can achieve.So it is easy to assume that more quality sleep is the way to go.This is only the half truth though.

Sleep is divided in two phases:the NREM and the REM.The REM is the phase in which we dream and is considered the most beneficial phase of sleep.By normally sleeping we get one to two hours of the REM phase considering an eight hour time frame.While this is a good amount of REM time there are ways to get more of it by using the polyphasic sleep method.There are several ways to do this method with the easiest one of them being doing a nap in the day and then six hours of sleep in the night.So you can reap the benefits of a good sleep and save some time in the process.

The above analysis though ignores one thing.It is known that when we sleep our body produces the growth hormone.Growth hormone stimulates growth,cell reproduction and regeneration and as you may have guessed it is mainly produced in our body while we sleep.This happens in time intervals (see here)leading to the conclusion that missing sleep leads to the potential loss of growth hormone.From that you can understand why there is so much emphasis on the eight or more hours of sleep per day recommendations.