Written By Kashish Sharma | Updated : February 24, 2023 8:54 AM IST
Growing evidence has shown that sleep is as important as food and exercise when it comes to maintaining good health. Science is showing an association between irregular or insufficient sleep with chronic illnesses like diabetes, cancer, depression and others. With scientists giving much more importance to the study of sleep, the time is right to break some myths around it.
Science has shown that sleep is not a passive phase but many rejuvenating changes occur while sleeping. In fact, sleep has been understood to occur in a cyclic pattern, with three stages of non-REM sleep followed by one REM phase and all these stages have significant regulatory and repair functions.
Most dreams occur during the REM phase of sleep and many of them are quickly forgotten. Studies have shown that to remember dreams, a person needs to wake up at the right time when the memory has not faded yet. It shows that people who quite often remember dreams are those who might more often wake up at night.
Alcohol reduces the time it takes to sleep and that’s why many people think that it makes us sleep better. However, studies have shown that alcohol disrupts the well-orchestrated phases of the sleep cycle and the person might not wake up that fresh the following day.
Socially teenagers are blamed for having an erratic sleep pattern and deliberately staying up late at night. Studies have shown that many teenagers are sleep-deprived because of this bias as their waking up late is not just a matter of choice but around puberty, the circadian rhythm of adolescents gets shifted by around two hours.