12 weird things your body does when you sleep
Come bedtime most of us are so exhausted that we barely have our pyjamas on and rarely even notice ourselves drifting off to sleep, but while we’re happily dozing in dreamland our body is amazingly still doing a lot of work to prepare ourselves for the next day. Here are some of the weird but wonderful things that you probably didn’t know your body is doing while you sleep.
1. Eye-twitching
In your deepest state of sleep, Rapid Eye Movement, aka REM sleep, your eyes dart from side to side under your eyelids. It is the deepest state of sleep and is the state of sleep in which dreams occur. It’s also the hardest to wake up from.
2. Feeling of falling
Similar to experiencing a spasm, when you fall in your dreams you can actually feel the feeling of falling, prompting to wake you up. We’ve all had that weird and frightening feeling of falling off a cliff!
3. Body temperature drop
Your body temperature drops considerably while you sleep in order to conserve calories and energy. During the day we’re burning a lot of calories, but at night we naturally cool down to keep hold of the calories that we need.
4. Your whole body is restored
A huge restorative process happens to all the cells in your body while you sleep, repairing and re-charging them for a new day. Guess our mums were right about the sleep!
5. You lose useless information
The brain is a huge storage system, so any thoughts that are useless and aren’t important are lost when you sleep to make room for the more important thoughts.
6. Your brain is really active
During REM sleep and dreaming your brain requires more oxygen to organise thoughts, so it can actually be more active than when you’re awake!
7. You wake up a lot
You wake up in sleep a lot, whether you’re aware of it or not. It usually happens when you’re changing from dreams to deep sleep and back to light sleep.
8. Sleep talking
Usually happens when you’re in the first two hours of sleep, still not in a deep sleep so you still have the muscle tone to talk out any dreaming.
9. Paralysis
When you’re fully asleep you’re muscles go into a sort of paralysis, which prevents you from acting out your dreams or moving your body until you wake up.
10. Spasms
They happen when your brain starts to fall asleep before your body, (when you’re absolutely wrecked!) resulting in you jumping and nearly killing the person in bed beside you!
11. Lose weight
You lose water from your body while you sleep, from perspiring, resulting in weight loss.
12. You grow
Because your body weight isn’t pressing on the discs in your spine when you lie vertically, you stretch a little every night! Who’d have known!