Since your muscles aren’t exactly up to much during sleep, less calories are burned, so your body gets colder. Apparently if you’re sleeping “normally” (a reasonable sleep schedule) your body is at its coldest around 2:30 A.M.
Despite your eyelids being shut, your eyes are pretty active during sleep. Sort of. During deeper stages of sleep, your eyes move more and more, and at its deepest, you hit a stage called Rapid Eye Movement, REM for short.
During the earliest stages of sleep, it’s not uncommon to have sudden spasms and jerks. It’s a natural part of the process, but sometimes your body can betray you a little here. Despite these spasms being part of sleep, they occasionally wake you up.
We’ll come back to this topic when we get to sleepwalking, but for the most part, your body’s muscles are paralyzed during sleep. The reason being that if you acted out your dreams, you could do some real damage to yourself (or others, for that matter).
While your body is technically shedding dead skin cells all the time, it sheds more and repairs more during sleep. The metabolic rate of skin increases during sleep, causing that natural result (incidentally, this is why you should wash your sheets with a certain frequency no matter what, they are technically filled with dead skin cells).
As a part of sleep, your brain sorts through information that’s going to stick around for a while and junks the rest.
Your throat is one of the few muscles that’s not paralyzed during sleep (for reasons that should be abundantly obvious). Since they’re more relaxed during sleep, the throat actually narrows, which is one of the contributing factors to snoring.
In slow-wave stages of sleep, your body produces all sorts of hormones, mostly for growth, cell reproduction, and cell regeneration.
You know how it’s a lot easier to get sick when you haven’t slept in a while? Your immune system is at its peak during sleep, which is why resting while sick is so important.
Don’t get too excited: Sleeping is not necessarily a surefire way to lose a ton of weight. While you sleep, sweating and exhaling humid air gets water out of your body, losing a small amount of weight. You actually do this during the day, but eating and drinking totally negate that.
Obvious enough, but there’s a reason why. Your body doesn’t produce nearly as much saliva during sleep since you don’t eat during sleep, resulting in a dry mouth when waking up.
This doesn’t always happen, but there’s a condition called sleep bruxism where you grind your teeth in your sleep. Unfortunately, it can damage your teeth over time, and no one’s really sure what causes it (the best guess is that it’s somehow a stress reliever). It’s not that rare either: Estimates claim around 5% of all people have the condition.
Yeah, this one’s bizarre, and somehow true. You’re only taller by a few centimeters at most after sleeping, but the reason it happens is that your spine extends while laying on your side, since it doesn’t have to support the weight it normally carries while you’re awake.
Considering everything else your body slows down during sleep, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Your blood pressure can drop by 5 to 7 points during a good sleep.
Sleepwalking is a tricky thing. It usually happens (if it happens at all) during transitions between stages of sleep, and during deeper stages too. This is why it’s hard to wake up sleepwalkers. It’s a mostly harmless activity, but there are plenty of cases where people have injured themselves during sleepwalking (look up a comedian named Mike Birbiglia for more on that).
I’m sure we’re all very familiar with this concept, but there’s a reason it happens. Your brain needs lots of oxygen while sleeping, so your blood flow increases, and it also increases in parts of your body where there’s a lot of blood vessels.
Obviously, we dream, but there is very little scientific understanding to why dreams happen and why our brains conjure up certain images. The closest we have to concrete facts on dreams is that we usually have 3 to 5 dreams a night, but that’s a rough average.
Apparently, our brains are known for making decisions while you’re asleep. Like dreams, it’s not an easily understood phenomenon, but it’s very real. Hell, even dozing can lead your brain to make important discoveries.
In the same way that most of the body relaxes during sleep, that goes for your sphincter muscles as well. Luckily, our sense of smell is diminished at night, so you (shouldn’t) even notice.
Toxins leaving your brain and body is crucial, and a lot if happens during sleep. This is one of the factors behind why sleep deprivation drives people insane.
Here’s another weird one. Apparently, many people wake up in the middle of sleep and go back to sleep so quickly that they do not remember waking up at all. If it happens, it usually happens during a transition of sleep stages.
This refers to sleep apnea, a disorder that affects millions of people from around the world. Basically, you stop breathing for seconds at a time, or minutes, keeping you from a good night’s sleep.
No, this isn’t a reference to sleeping while being in the military. There is a rare syndrome literally known as “exploding head syndrome,” and it’s not like the movie Scanners. During sleep, you can suddenly hear an imagined sound so loud that you think it’s a gunshot, or even a bomb going off. It’s not a physical disorder with any pain, but it’s known for scaring the Hell out of folks.
I’m sure many of you out there have encountered this or are guilty of this yourselves. While there’s lots of information about what kinds of things people are known to say in their sleep, not much is known about what exactly causes it.
As a part of paralyzing many muscles, your nerves don’t receive pain signals as much and send them to the brain. This is actually tied into that farting thing a bit. Kind of. Remember when I said your sense of smell is diminished during sleep? This is why, since that’s also tied to nerve action.
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