The Sheep Counter
Your Sleep Questions scientifically Answered
What do I do when I Sleep ?When sleeping, you do all the vital self-energizing, self-restoring, self-growing and self-healing jobs, which are physiologically impossible for your human organism to perform while awake. By sleeping, you earn life income. Your salary is granted and paid absolutely fairly according to how well you do your non-conscious sleep work. The currency you are paid in is life energy, health, wellbeing, ease and joy of life. The better your daily sleep job, the more you earn. When you are awake, you unavoidably spend that income. You can live on a life credit card for decades and habitually overspend when awake. We call that "Sleep Deprivation". It never ever pays off to spend more than you have earned. When the bill with interest finally arrives, it non-negotiably really hurts ... Here are a few major sleep activities you must perform daily to earn wellbeing income. Scroll down or click on a sleep job to learn more: Whenever you really sleep, you perform a phenomenally complex and simultaneous array of absolutely vital daily activities. Your primary Sleep Activities in Detail: Inner digestion: Swallowing food and drink when awake does not make anything available to you yet. You just have collected raw materials into your internal raw material warehouses (stomach, intestines etc.). There, given sufficient time after ingesting, a colony of tiny helpers you host inside take the raw materials apart for you and process them into tiny molecular components. These microorganisms are called "microbiota" or "probiotics". By sleeping, you activate your intestinal cells. They now identify and pick up useful molecules and - just as important - identify and keep out useless or toxic molecules. With your inner organs you now must process the useful molecules to
Inner digestion is an absolutely vital sleep job. It is a very slow ongoing osmotic full-body process, which requires quite some energy and a lot of time. Growing and Healing From the very first moment of your existence as a single fertilized egg cell, you continuously keep building and repairing every single cell of your entire organism according the genetic blueprint of a human organism as stored in your personal body design library in every cell (your DNA). To grow yourself, you use materials and energy resources you have produced with your inner digestion job, in particular building materials and biofuel. Because you had to grown yourself from one single cell, you daily needed the most sleep as an infant, a little less as a child, yet a little less as an adolescent, and the least as a healthy adult with a fully grown body and brain from an age of 24 years on throughout your adult life, when you no longer need to increase the number of your cells and only need to replace those daily, which have become damaged or done their job and died. Healing from anything is no different from growing. You need to re-grow parts of damaged cells or replace broken cells with new ones you need to grow - molecule by molecule, no matter whether the cause of has been an infection or an injury However, any repair of damaged cells requires additional sleep activity. In other words, if you experience any injury or illness, you need to stay longer at the growing cells job than without. If you don't allow for that extra time at the job, you non-negotiably heal yourself slower or don't heal at all. By the way: Experiencing any enduring physical, emotional, or mental sickness, disease, or illness is as such an indisputable and reliable indicator that you inadvertently have been neglecting your sleep jobs since quite a while. Growing and Healing your cells is a vital life-long ongoing daily sleep activity, which consumes great amounts of time and energy. Internal Waste Processing Every cell of your body not only continuously must consume biofuel, building bricks, and utilities you are manufacturing by inner digestion, every living cell also continuously must produce waste. Every moment of your life, some of your cells have done their duty and die. Their remains become waste. When you sleep, you collect waste from every cell by means of your internal transport systems (blood system, lymph system). You deliver the waste to your complex waste processing organs, which either dispose of it directly (e.g. lungs, skin) or process and recycle it and deliver the rest to your internal waste containers (e.g. bladder, colon, etc.) If these waste containers become full, you briefly interrupt sleeping naturally, activate your muscles, wake up and open your eyes, so that you can move and go to empty your waste containers in order to make room for more. Waking up to empty your waste containers - even several times per night - is certainly not any sleep issue. Contrary, it is natural, healthy, and a sign of a successful sleep job. Internal waste collection and processing is a vital very slow osmotic activity that requires energy and time. Detoxing Your Body Every atom or molecule that has no business in you as part of your biochemical body design, or is present in too high a concentration, must create biochemical havoc inside you and cause harm to your cells. Hence, it is "toxic", meaning damaging your cells, poisonous. At every moment of your life, there are naturally always a few toxic molecules that have made it into your body, particularly when awake, mostly by breathing, touching something, taking something into your mouth, swallowing something, or applying something to your skin. These toxic particles accumulate inside you and eventually become a threat by their number while you are awake. Less frequent but more dramatic are toxins injected into you by any other living being, mostly when awake. They cause a sudden high concentration of toxins in your system. Such events could be a bee sting, a bite of a poisonous snake, or any needle injection by a human with medical or recreational chemicals. While you need to instantly react already when a wake, they force you non-negotiably to increase your detoxing activity to the max when sleeping later, thus reducing your resources for other vital sleep activities. You can only compensate by sleeping longer. A very vital part of your sleep work is to locate and identify such harmful molecules anywhere in your body, to biochemically neutralize them, and add them to your waste removal task. Detoxing yourself is an ongoing life-long slow osmotic primary sleep activity, consuming time and energy. Detoxing deals with toxic atoms and molecules. Its twin sleep activity is Immune Work, which deals with much larger intruders. Immune Work Immune work, the twin activity of detoxing, is your inner defense sleep activity against larger living intruders such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites, which have made it through your filters and outer defence lines into your organism, where they start damaging your cells or even feed on them. When you sleep, you survey your entire organism constantly. Wherever you detect them, you attempt to neutralize and dismantle such intruders. Once you have conquered one, you add it as rubble to your waste removal tasks. There is no such thing as an "Immune System" in your body, despite it being a fashionable medical term. Nobody has ever discovered one so far. Immune work is not a thing. It is a fundamentally vital full-body sleep activity, in that every cell of your body participates in some way or other when you sleep. If you detect any intruders, you naturally throw everything you have in stock at them to keep the upper hand. You need to stay on the job as long as required to achieve required results. Else, the intruders escape, multiply, and win a battle, which forces you to launch an internal war resulting in what medical professional may detect and call "inflammation" or "infection". Immune Work is a continuous ongoing slow activity that engages your entire organism, takes time and consumes energy. The more intruders there are, the more sleep time and energy you require to successfully deal with them. Last and by no means least ... Memory Clean-up and Updating Servicing your memory is one of your most important non-conscious sleep activities. A Write-and-Ready memory is a biological feature we humans have in common with all other mammals and with birds. We don't have a memory for fun or to shine with academic performance. We absolutely need a memory to biologically function the way our organism is genetically designed. We humans must learn any awake behaviour we can perform - from breathing to walking, speaking, texting in iPhones, thinking, driving a car, raising kids, or playing piano. Learning is the multi-step process of first temporarily recording a try-and error action, then save the recording if the action has been successful, so that we can read it next time the action is required; then re-enforce the recording by repetition. Learning absolutely requires a physical write-and-read memory. Every memory is a tangible object, hardware. Your memory is not "an obscure thing in your brain". Your memory is your entire organism. Every cell is a physical part of your memory. That is why you can feel certain emotions in certain parts of your body, if you observe yourself carefully. It is where you keep the respective information stored. The conscious part of your memory - things you intellectually learn and may "remember" - is really insignificant. The huge and vital part of your memory contains non-conscious information. It is information you need to control your movements and to identify objects and people. You absolutely need this non-conscious information to survive the moment - e.g. information about how to breathe (you have learned that activity clumsily during the first moments right after your birth). Every memory - whether biological or technological - can only store a limited amount of information, which is ultimately dictated - like the memory of your computer - by its physical size. Your personal memory capacity is physically limited by the number of cells of your body. It is absolutely vital that you daily clean up and actualize information stored in your memory. You need to delete as much out-dated info as you can and replace it with accurate info daily. A saturated non-conscious memory is life threatening. Unlearning is just as important as learning. Like you cannot clean up your computer's memory while using its memory to work with, you cannot clean-up your own memory, while using it to recognize objects and people, to move and navigate yourself around - while being awake. The following memory clean-up actions you can only perform when having immobilized yourself, closed your eyes, and taken your conscious awareness offline:
Occasionally, you may carry over a small fraction of your intense memory maintenance sleep work into your awake state. In this case, you may be able to consciously remember that you have done what we commonly call "dreaming". Every time you sleep and as long as you sleep you perform all these complex activities non-stop and simultaneously, most competently directed, coordinated and prioritized by your brain. Your brain - in fact not a single cell of your body - ever does nothing. Imagine, you'd have to do all these sleep activities consciously and on will-power all night long, while simultaneously also consciously directing your heartbeat and coordinating your breathing with it. How long do you think could you survive? Obviously, your "mind", your conscious awareness, intelligence, and willpower are by far not as important, useful, and dominant as you might have been made to believe. You are certainly much better off with your mind offline and out of the way while performing your vital sleep activities. - - - - - - - Next Question in Line: What is a Sleep Cycle ? |
Institute for Human Biology
- Chemainus BC, Canada
Martin H. Gremlich Phil II, ATP, PiC
human-biology.org