why sleeping make us recover faster from illness? Does “force sleeping” (pills) have the same effect?
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We have no pills that force you to sleep — we’ve only diversified our portfolio of ways to give your brain increasingly impolite suggestions that it ought to go to sleep immediately. All of them are merely ways of encouraging that transition into the regular state of sleep (though many of them can decrease the quality of that sleep, for sure — both antihistamines and THC, the active component in cannabis, are good at persuading you to sleep, but not so good for favorable sleep brainwaves).
As for why sleeping is good for sickness — when you’re awake, your body is doing all sorts of stuff to keep you alive, conscious, and aware of your environment. It is also digesting your food, moving your muscles, etc. — all kinds of stuff, in addition to fighting an infection if you have one. When you’re asleep, the body has a lot less stuff to do at once, and energy is more efficiently directed towards fighting off infections. It’s also less likely that energy is diverted away from immune processes and toward digesting chicken noodle soup, for example.
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