: What’s the deciding factor for our body to finally sleep and be subconscious

Question

We can take as short as 1 min to sleep to as long as a few hours. What’s the final step before our body finally decides to sleep into a state of subconscious

In: Biology

Answer 1

There is not a deciding factor because sleep is not an on/off switch. It’s much better to think about being asleep as a sliding scale. On one side of the scale you have being fully awake, and on the other side you have being soundly asleep.

As you go to sleep at night, you are just sliding that scale over. At some point you will “lose consciousness” and that just means your mind is no longer processing sensory input as memory. But again, that did not happen instantly. Your mind was processing those sensory inputs less and less as you were sliding the scale. And even after you have fallen asleep, the scale keeps sliding to a deeper sleep.

I hope that makes sense!