Top Ten Important Things That Happen to You While You're Sleeping

During sleeping, well, the Non-REM stages, which is when you're in a very deep sleep and usually aren't dreaming or having your eyes go all over the place and all those other side effects that happen during REM sleep, your body strengthens and builds on your bones and muscles. This is actually relating to the growth hormone I mentioned earlier, but I decided to put this as a separate item because not only does the hormone help build on your bone and muscles, but it helps strengthen them. You know how sometimes you pull a muscle or injure it in some way and people tell you "don't worry, get some sleep and it'll be better in the morning", and then it is better in the morning? That's because of this improvement in bone and muscle. Another thing that happens during this stage that I didn't list, as part of the growth hormone thing, is strengthening of your metabolism.

You ever wonder why some people get diabetes, or heart problems, or obesity, or even all three, while others don't? It's partly random or because of the health choices of the person at hand, but another big factor is a good sleep. Being able to get enough sleep strengthens all of your organs and both your immune system and your nervous system and all your other systems, etc. but what else does this help, other than the basic things that happen with said system or organ or muscle? It actually improves your resistance to various health problems. There's many that this will not improve, and while you may fight off an illness during this time, it won't prevent you from getting it, but for health problems, it will help a lot. Lack of sleep helps induce cancer, as well as heart problems, diabetes, and even obesity, which you may think was caused by food choices but is only partly done by that.

One of the most important things that happens during sleep is that you improve your memory function. This means that it prepares you to be able to remember the events of the next day. I did just list how it processes and helps you remember the day before your sleep's events, but this enables you to help remember the next day. When you wake up the next day, it may be much easier to answer questions because your brain helps your memory the night before, and you slowly use that boost it gave you until by the end of the day, when it helps you fix it again. A huge example from my personal life is with speeches. When you're practicing a speech late at night you can barely keep your cue cards straight. But I noticed that if I go straight from my bed downstairs and practice immediately, I remember practically everything!

Your immune system is what helps you fight of sicknesses, in a really complex web of all sorts of things that defend your body. Sleep strengthens them, replaces older white blood cells, and gets it back going really well. Without sleep, you're much more susceptible to getting sick, getting more badly sick than you normally would, and not being able to fight it off for a very long time. It's impressive that the body does this so well, and this is another reason why when you're sick you should always go and get extra rest, and make sure you have a good night's sleep so you can fully fight it off once and for all. We're halfway through the list, and it's hard to believe that there's more important things that the body does, but there are, so let's keep going!

You may have noticed that many people seem to make poor decisions, and while that's sometimes biased and irrelevant, it may be because lack of sleep. You might do really stupid things at sleepovers, or when you've been up all night working, and that's because you haven't had enough sleep. During the nervous system process, which separately improves memory function and sorts and processes the day's information, it also improves your ability to think more clearly and make better decisions. It's really important because you need a quick mind to succeed in life, and this is one of the sole reasons you can do so during the day.

Much like with the healing and repairing of human tissue and bones, your body heals and repairs the heart and blood vessels while you sleep, much more so than during the day. Blood circulation, which is what the circulatory system is all about, is one of the most vital parts of our body and without it we wouldn't be able to live, as there would be no circulation. It's not like your circulatory system would be completely destroyed without this proccess, but with a lack of sleep it would deteriorate over time and you'd end up either moving like a sloth (not too bad), or dead

Without sleep, it's pretty darn hard to remember the events of a day before. You may be wondering "But Sloth, I've pulled all nighters before and I remember the events before really clearly!", but that's probably because you got sleep in the next few hours after that. I remember the few times I pulled all-nighters, but what I don't remember is the day afterward, where I probably acted like a zombie the whole time. Anyways, we're kind of getting off topic here. Your brain sorts everything that happened in the day, and processes it all. Sometimes you may have a dream related to what happened the day before. That may be because it's what's on your mind, or it may be because your body is going through this process. It's very essential.

Again, when you fall into the deeper and deeper stages of sleep, you'll be harder to wake at this time and most likely not dreaming, and while this happens your muscles will have a huge increase in blood flow around them, and when the blood cells go by they bring lots of oxygen and nutrients that help repair the muscles for the next day, as well as regenerating the cells around there. You would not be able to work out very well without this process happening, and if you don't sleep your muscles will be much more tender the next day, and if you hit them on the wall by accident it'll hurt much more than under normal circumstances.