The internet is full of advice for how to get more sleep, better sleep, deeper sleep, delicious sleep– you name it, the internet has a to-do list for anything related to sleep.
Don’t even get me started on pillows. Nap dresses have been well-covered by Sam here.
It turns out (unsurprisingly), that modern medicine has been working on better understanding sleep for a long time. I came across this 1925 article (reprinted in JAMA– The Journal of the American Medical Association) that offers us some useful observations about sleep. Here are some of them:
The state of sleep is NOT like being under anesthesia or in a faint (in case you were wondering).
Pulse rate and blood pressure drop during sleep, but do not cause sleep; rather, it’s the other way around.
To wit: “if the drop in pressure were causative, then reclining, being a position favorable for loss of tone, should lead to a more pronounced pressure drop than that of the semierect position, being more conducive to sleep.”
Sleep is sometimes peaceful, but other times we have active dreams and nightmares.
To wit: “the conception of sleep as a period of quiescence and recuperation has thus to be qualified by the contingency of disturbed sleep with active calls on the nervous system, the heart and the blood vessels.”
And here’s their conclusion, which no one can argue with:
In other words, what is true of many factors in life seems also to apply to sleep: most sleeps are good, but some may be far better than others.
Who needs the internet when researchers were hard at work explaining sleep to us a century ago?
Sleep well, dear readers…
