Why can’t we go to sleep on demand like how we are controlling other parts of the body?

Question

We can stop breathing when we want to. We can also “tell” our body to do what we want such as moving, holding, typing, etc. So why can’t we just “tell” our brain to go to sleep immediately instead of having to wait for it to fall asleep.

In: 826

Answer 1

We don’t know.

We know that sleep is a very complex process: several things must happen in a specific way for sleep to happen but we don’t understand why we cannot command those things.

Sleep is an unconscious act and we have no executive control over it, we just *fall* or *shift* into a sleep state.