I’ve always been curious as to how the body seems to heal different issues primarily during sleep, for example I’ve had a few sebaceous cysts in my life and they’re always noticeably smaller when I wake up whereas while I’m awake I can’t generally tell if anything has happened at all. Or even say the dentist, had a few wisdom teeth pulled one tike and each consecutive day after sleep the pain / swelling has been reduced drastically.
I also have RA and most of the pain / swelling is always gone or reduced in the morning compared to the previous day / night ? In some sense it’s almost like my disease has been ‘reset’.
In: Biology
In addition to less time and energy being spent moving around and being awake, you also do not notice things while you are asleep. During the day, changes happen over a few hours are small enough that you might not notice, but being asleep for eight hours (plus however long before you fell asleep) allows those changes to add up.
It is similar to how you might not notice how much a younger sibling grows when you see them every day, but if you are gone for a summer, you will notice the change.
RA is a completely different story, but it may just be that laying down and relaxing completely allows your body to reset. Then, as you go through your day, mental and physical stress, as well as the movement of the affected joints, adds up to cause discomfort. It is a little puzzling, since RA is an autoimmune disorder, and I would think it would be worse while you are asleep, since your immune system can be more active, but it might be that with RA, it is joint movement that causes the immune system to attack. (Now that I think about it, someone I know with Crohn’s disease, which is similar to RA in many ways, also seems to be in more pain later in the day, and seems to be in better shape first thing in the mornings.)
Hopefully, someone who knows more about RA/autoimmune disorders and the effects of sleep on the immune system can help us understand.
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