The Hidden Midnight Shift Inside Your System
While you are completely checked out and drifting through dreamland, your body transforms into a bustling, twenty-four-hour maintenance crew working diligently under the cover of night. We tend to view sleep as a passive state of total inactivity, but your internal organs are actually executing a highly coordinated sequence of bizarre biological rituals that can only happen in the dark. From microscopic brain washing to sudden physical paralysis, your physical form undergoes a massive nightly overhaul to ensure you wake up feeling refreshed and functional tomorrow morning.
1. Initiating the Cerebral Rinse Cycle
Your brain does not just sit idly in your skull while you rest; it actively flushes out harmful metabolic waste using your cerebrospinal fluid. During deep sleep, your brain cells actually shrink by about sixty percent to allow this cleansing fluid to flow through your neural pathways much more efficiently. This nightly scrub down washes away toxic proteins that build up during your waking hours.
2. Growing Slightly Taller by Dawn
Your spine decompresses overnight because you’ve taken your feet off of it. This means your vertebrae can absorb more fluids and spread further apart than they can during the day. You can grow up to half an inch taller over night depending on how much pressure you place on your spine throughout the day.
3. Shifting Your Internal Thermostat Down
Your internal body temperature decreases before you fall asleep to help your body conserve energy. Your temperature will drop by a couple degrees and reach its lowest point around 4 a.m. Your organs literally slow down during sleep because they don’t need to be “on” all night.
4. Paralyzing Your Major Muscle Groups
Your brain sends signals to your body to temporarily paralyze your muscles while you sleep. This keeps you from acting out your dreams and hurting yourself. The paralysis affects only your voluntary muscles. So your organs continue to function.
5. Consolidating Your Daily Memory Stash
Sleep sorts through the information you take in during the day and transfers it into long term memory. Your brain sorts through everything you learned that day while you sleep and stores what it deems important in your hippocampus. It also tosses out unnecessary information.
6. Unleashing a Sudden Surge of Growth Hormone
Your pituitary gland releases a flood of human growth hormone while you sleep. Growth hormones are necessary to rebuild muscle tissues and repair damaged cells. Deep sleep cycles trigger the release of these hormones.
7. Suppressing Your Urge to Go
The reason you don’t wake up every hour to use the bathroom is because your brain tricks you into thinking you don’t have to go. Your brain secretes more vasopressin while you sleep. Vasopressin is an anti-diuretic hormone your body produces to prevent you from losing water.
8. Testing Your Visual System Randomly
Your eyes move constantly while your asleep… even though they are closed. Your eyes are believed to move in correlation with your dreams. Every time you change scenes in your dreams, your eyes shift position.
9. Checking and Dropping Your Blood Pressure
Did you know your blood pressure decreases while you sleep? This dip in blood pressure is known as cardiovascular dipping. Your heart gets a rest while you sleep and your blood pressure decreases by ten to twenty percent.
Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash
10. Adjusting Your Fullness Hormones
Your appetite hormones, leptin and ghrelin, get stabilized while you snooze. Sleep increases leptin production. Leptin is what makes you feel full or tells your brain that you don’t need to eat.
11. Overhauling Your Immune Defenses
Sleep restores the immune system by creating cytokines. Cytokines are specialized proteins that protect your body from stress and infection. Sleep deprived individuals tend to get sick more often. Your body will actually force you to sleep if you catch a cold.
12. Unconscious Jaw Clenching and Grinding
Have you ever woken up with a stiff jaw or a headache? You may have been clenching your jaw while you slept. Nighttime teeth grinding is completely subconscious and can be caused by stress or airway abnormalities.
13. Experiencing Sudden Whole-Body Twitches
If you’ve ever felt yourself fall while asleep and violently jerking yourself awake, don’t worry. It’s completely normal and is called a hypnic jerk. Your brain mistakes the relaxing of your muscles for you falling and panics, causing you to jerk awake.
14. Smoothly Sloughing Off Dead Skin Cells
Cell division increases while you sleep. This means your skin is literally regenerating and repairing itself overnight. It’s always best to apply lotion before bed because your skin can better absorb the nutrients while asleep.
15. Digesting Food at a Crawl
While your body is busy repairing and sorting itself during sleep your digestion takes a back seat. Your stomach produces less acid and slow digestion ensures your body can focus on more important tasks. Eating too much before bed can cause your body to become overworked and give you nightmares or even heartburn.
16. Fabricating Creative False Realities
Everyone dreams while they sleep but did you know that our left brain essentially shuts down? Our left brain is responsible for logic and rational thinking. That’s why dreams can seem so real and weird at the same time.
17. Tuning Up Your Vocal Cords
Your voice is hoarse in the mornings because your vocal cords and throat are dehydrated from hours of sleeping. Your throat muscles also relax when you sleep which changes the vibration of your vocal cords. Drinking water helps!
18. Cleansing Your Internal Organs of Gas
We all do it, but did you know you pass gas while you sleep? Your digestive system is still going while you snooze so your body has no choice but to release it. Thanks to deep sleep paralysis, you are unaware of your body passing gas at night.
19. Refining Your Motor Skills and Talents
If you learned how to play a new song on the piano tonight, your brain will be busy strengthening those muscle memories while you sleep. Sleep helps your motor cortex better retain the specific movements you practiced that day. Think of sleep as brainpaste for your physical talents.
20. Regenerating Spinal Fluid Reserves
Your brain also replenishes its store of cerebrospinal fluid while you sleep. This fluid acts as a sort of shock absorber for your brain and spinal cord. Overnight your body works to filter and refill your cerebrospinal fluid so you wake up feeling refreshed.
KEEP ON READING
20 Ways To Get Your Vitamins And Minerals
20 Ways Doing Less Can Actually Improve Your Health
