The Laws and principles of sleep.

A buzzing from the alarm clock and the ringing of the telephone are the first sounds I hear after a night`s or day`s sleep. Mixed with drunkenness the memories of restless or dreamfilled night fill my mind. Almost blind I bat at the clocks, hoping to hit the snooze button and snatch a few more minutes of sleep.

The alarms sound again. "Hell, I have to wake up!" I tell myself.

Sometimes with only three hours of sleep, I am faced with a packed day and busy schedule.

Its not uncommon that many wake up exhausted, with the day seeming to begin far too early. The daily pressures of home, family, work and pressing financial issues weigh on all. A never ending list of tasks await our attention, tempting many people to stay up a little later at night.

Are these lost hours of rest are more vital than most realize?

Sleep experts once thought that five to six hours of slumber each night was enough to maintain a healthy lifestyle. However, based on new scientific measurements of the human body, they have adjusted these figures to seven or eight hours. Statistics show that one third of a person`s life is spent sleeping, yet a high percentage of people averages less than the recommended seven hours per night, which experts classify as "mildly sleep deprived".

William Dement, a pioneer of sleep research, found that there is a correlation between sleep and health. "In maintaining good health, sleep may be more critical than diet, exercise, even heredity" he said.

Most do not realize that laws and principles govern our health, including the principle of getting sufficient sleep each day. Practicing the rules governing sleep will yield tremendous benefits, such as better job performance, mental clarity and a greater capacity to manage stress. So does disobeying these Laws bring harmful consequences? How do you sleep? What does it feel like after a good sleep in comparison to a short or restless one? What benefits do we gain from a good sleep?

I'm sleeping good at the moment and its a bit of hobby of mine. I try to lucid dream every night because I realised I was spending almost half my life asleep and I didnt want to waste it being switched off or having fragmented meanginless dreams which I couldnt even remember!

Some nights when I'm dreaming it feels like I've lived for about 3 days and when that happens I actually wake up a little bamboozled... so now instead of losing half my life to sleep, I am perhaps doubling it!

I do not know if thats healthy, but luckily physically my body is not tired. In my mind it makes the physical reality of daytime a little bit boring compared to the crazy fantasy situations in dreams. This often makes me wonder which experiences are more fulfilling.... is daytime just the grind to support a dreamscape!?

Thats a bit extreme but I do agree people need more sleep for health reasons. In men, 60% to 70% of daily human growth hormone is released during early deep sleep. Its when the body tries to repair itself the most, while asleep.

Sleep is important, especially to get 7-8 hours, because (as a psych major we study this stuff) you go into a deep sleep early in the night, and your body does a lot of physical maintenance and repair. This is what the first few hours of your sleep are kind of focused on, just repairing the body and fixing it all up, after that your body focuses more on your brain, and it begins the neuronal changes and the hormone balancing, and you get your rem sleep most at this point.

A big problem with not sleeping enough (5-6 hours) is that you will miss out on a good chunk of your rem sleep, so next night your body will try to make up for it in a phenomenon called REM rebound, so the next night you will begin rem earlier and have it go longer, but if you are still only getting 5-6 hours instead of the full 8, you are still not getting enough rem, and now you didn't get enough maintenance time either, and you are stuck in this cycle while you are under sleeping, so please, all of you, SLEEP!

I can't believe I did not read this forum 2 months ago. Back in December I had a sleep study preformed on me. I found out that I slept about 4 hours or less a night. My sleep apnea is mild, but they told me my snoring was horrific. I was waking up about every 2-5 min., because of my snoring. So after seeing an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist. It was determined that my tonsils and adenoids are over sized and the best thing to do was to take them out so a can sleep better. So here on the 27 of February I am having them removed. I really hope this works