What causes us to lose consciousness when we go to sleep?
In: Biology
Have you ever been day dreaming, and then you realize your eyes were closed and you stopped paying attention to the world and you were starting to doze? Your brain was starting to go to sleep, then you woke yourself up. The brain begins sleep in stages that alter your awareness of your surroundings, and the activity of your brain. When you find it difficult to concentrate and your mind keeps going off on tangents thinking about things unrelated to what you’re doing, like it’s on a comforting auto pilot, it’s trying to fall asleep.
This day dreaming is the first stage, you relax and in a way you are sort of hypnotizing yourself. The thoughts become a distraction that makes you reflect and focus inward, instead of outward, and the more inwardly your attention lies, an more caught up in these comforting half thoughts, the more you slip into the early stages of sleep.
If you’re not disturbed and you are not trying to stay awake, this daydreaming leads to light sleeping. From that point on, you have the normal sleep cycle which would be a lot to explain.
One important step in the falling asleep process is somewhere between the dozing and daydreaming part of it, your mind put the parking brake on your body and sort of paralyzes you. This is for your protection so that as you daydream of running through fields of flowers, your legs don’t start running in place.
Sometimes if this sleep paralysis happens too early before you’re fully sleeping, or your suddenly disturbed in this state, you will have whats called a hypnic jerk. If you’ve ever fallen asleep at your desk and your head starts to roll off your hand and you suddenly snap awake, this is what happened. Your body’s emergency “turn off the paralysis!” button got hit and you literally jerked.
There are less fun ways to fall asleep though. The dozing, daydreaming type of sleep only comes when you’re relaxed and while tired, you’re not exhausted or seriously sleep deprived. Ironically the less sleep you get, the harder it is to get the good restful sleep you need.
Instead, if you’re very sleep deprived, or stressed, tired, exhausted, your sleep might come without the pleasant day dreaming. It might happen so fast, you sleep a few minutes, then wake back up, and never realize you were asleep, because the brain isn’t really going through stages of falling asleep so much as it’s just blanking out from exhaustion, then you wake back up because you’re tired and stressed. Some of the time when you are awake all night thinking you can’t sleep, you actually have slept, but it was the unfulfilling kind of emergency sleep of an exhausted person, not the restful sleep of someone comfortable and healthy. And you probably slept for only a few minutes at a time and not very deeply. To your perception, you were awake continuously.
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