Do you press the Snooze button when the alarm goes off in the morning, thinking that extra minutes of sleep will make you wake up more a...
Do you press the Snooze button when the alarm goes off in the morning, thinking that extra minutes of sleep will make you wake up more actively? We regret to tell you that this is just a trick to confuse our bodies and minds in vain, and it is one of many myths that we believe when it comes to our sleep habits.
Here are eight myths about sleep, most of which we've always believed:
Sleep hours decrease as technology advances
It seems logical to us that our ancestors in the past had a better sleep, because they had no entertainment and technology that pushed them to stay up late at night, as many of us do today.
But it's shocking to know that this is just a myth, which we have long thought was true, as recent studies have shown that today we are sleeping longer than before.
Researchers at the University of California compared sleep habits of people living in industrial cities, surrounded by technology, to the sleep habits of people who depend on fishing in rural areas that are almost devoid of modern-day features.
The study showed that, while those surrounded by technological devices have hours of sleep, on average, between 7 and 8 hours, those living in remote areas sleep about 5 hours on average.
A little sleep, after you click the Snooze button, will feel better
Many of us press the nap button when the alarm goes off in the morning, thinking we only need 10 more minutes to feel better in the first minutes of waking up a day.
Unfortunately, this trick is actually doing more harm than good.
Repeatedly pressing the slumber button for extra minutes of sleep stirs the body and mind because we wake up every day at different times.
Our minds can also stop perceiving the sound of the alarm as a signal of waking time. The mind exercises time to push the button of slumber and does not treat the alarm as an instrument to wake you from sleep. It is seen as a means to give you extra sleep.
Sleep experts say that when you go back to sleep after clicking a sleep button, your body tries to start another sleep cycle, but it won't end.
It increases the feeling of ataxia when you wake up, and delays the time your body needs to wake up completely and become fully active to start a new day.
Women need more sleep because their mind works more
In 2016, rumors spread on social media that women need more sleep than men because their brains work more.
The study was not supported by scientific grounds, yet it was widely popular and spread like wildfire.
In fact, there was a 2014 study by the Social Insurance Foundation of Finland on how sleep affects sick leave for men and women, and they found that the ideal average sleep for men was 7.8 hours, whereas the perfect hours for women were 7.6. The scientific community has therefore not yet agreed on this matter.
Fast eye movement sleep is the most important stage of sleep
When it comes to sleep cycles, we always hear that the "rapid eye movement" stage is the most important of all, the stage we dream about.
But in fact, slow wave sleep, or delta sleep, is also very important, although most of us have never heard of it before.
We don't dream about Delta sleep, but during this stage of deep sleep we are at the very point of our actual environment.
Deep sleep occurs near the beginning of the night (dream in the hours near the day), and during the sleep phase of a delta, our bodies secrete growth hormones.
Deep sleep is thought to be filtering the mind to prepare us for the next day.
When you wake up in the middle of a deep sleep, you realize that, because it causes you to feel this sense of ataxy and disconnected from the environment that's so hard to get out of.
Delta sleep is also the time when blood that gets into the brain and goes into muscles decreases instead, which can repair any muscle damage that occurs during the day.
This phase is also linked to weight control and the ability of the immune system to maintain our health, making it a critical phase, although we often ignore it.
Sleep for 8 hours straight one night is the best
We hear this all the time, we have to go to bed from seven to eight hours every night to get to our best condition, but this is not a very accurate fact.
According to Matt Bianchi, director of sleep at Massachusetts General Hospital, everyone is slightly different in the number of hours needed, as there is no general rule that applies to everyone.
And the professors at the University of California, San Francisco, have found that some people have a genetic mutation that allows them to live a perfect life by sleeping just six hours at night, which indicates that it's more individual than we thought.
Insomnia just means you can't sleep
Insomnia is actually much more complicated than just your inability to sleep, because there are huge variations in the way people feel insomnia.
Some people with insomnia sleep very easily, but they wake up in the middle of the night.
Insomnia may also be uncomfortable sleep, and when you wake up in the morning you feel like you haven't slept at all.
According to the National Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood, insomnia is characterized as long sleepless nights, or getting up too early, or feeling unslept at all.
Insomnia signals occur during the day as well, and these signs appear as problems of concentration, depression, and waking up with a feeling of fatigue.
The secret of getting up early
Some people wake up and are willing to go with the first line of daylight, while others feel that night is the most appropriate environment for them.
People have always been told that they're either night owls or a day bird, but there's research from the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences that suggests it's much more complicated.
When they did a study of 130 participants, they found that only 29 of them could get up early actively, while 44 participants preferred to sleep late.
And the others were somewhere between this and that, there were 25 people who were active both day and night, and there were 32 people who felt tired either way.
This seems to suggest that categorization by the time we like to sleep and the time we feel active is less obvious and simpler than dividing the entire world population into two distinct types.
Our studies seem to suggest that we have no idea how complicated it actually is.
Lester University has published a study looking at the genes of fruit flies, which are similar to our genes, to see if there's a genetic connection between favorite bedtimes and genes. And they found that there was a connection, and they were able to identify 80 different genes that all affect the favorite bedtime and wake up.
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