Depriving yourself of sleep: the risks

The current world is out, available, everything to be enjoyed. The lights do not go out and the rhythms do not decelerate. If we were all peasants, however, in winter, at four in the afternoon we would already start turning towards the night; we would leave the work tools to take us home and light a fire. The example is extreme, but we need it to understand that those who work with the earth follow the rhythms of it. After dinner there is a book or a conversation, a game of cards, something hot to drink and then the pillow.

How much to sleep ? But first of all, why do it?

Depriving yourself of sleep means altering the production of cortisol, especially if there is an accumulation of sleepless hours. When cortisol goes haywire, the body receives messages of accelerated aging : metabolism disorders, poor physical performance. Not only: if we do not sleep, we expose the immune system to a number of fairly serious chronic pathologies, we carry ourselves towards the excessive consumption of sugars and therefore towards forms of overweight, obesity, circulation problems. To cope with a sleepiness that is the normal consequence of lack of sleep, then, we take stimulants that become a cause of insomnia .

Anyone who then practices constant training immediately suffers from lack of sleep; James B. Maas, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown how lack of sleep can compromise the athlete's immune system and reduce its neuro-muscular capacities, which leads to various consequences, such as, for example, l increase in the energy cost of the athletic gesture and the alteration of the basic heart rate, together with the decrease in the concentration of glycogen in the muscles.

Concerns, external stimuli, random choices due to lack of contact with oneself are all factors that interfere with the rhythms of sleep. But the rhythm of sleep is the son of the constant dialogue between our inner rhythm and what we adopt to move in the world .

Sleep: a question of rhythm

What is sacred is not touched at random, carelessly and carelessly. If you make sleep a metaphorical place to visit with care, the approach to the question already varies. It makes no sense to say that one must sleep or give oneself strict rules to understand how much to sleep; it is the body itself that wants to sleep. Mythology explains that the guardian god of sleep, known to the Greeks as Hypnos and the Romans as Somnus, is the son of the night . At night, therefore, it would be good to sleep. However, it is true that some individuals have certain amounts of sleep that may coincide with the middle of the night or not. Each of us has our own rhythm and must be discovered without violating or forcing anything. This is as true as the truth is that the quantity does not ensure the quality of sleep.

Once you find your own pace, in fact, it's good to treat those hours of sleep as very precious, being, in fact, really. A good book by Wilfred R. Pigeon, "Manual of good sleep", explains how to achieve perfect rest. The book consists of two parts: the first analyzes sleep in relation to the organism's functions and explores disorders related to lack of sleep, while the second part helps the reader to judge the quality of his sleep and teaches him to improve it through exercises, natural remedies and medical interventions.

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