Sleep is an indispensable activity of human beings, but nowadays, most of us are in a state of lack of sleep, so more and more people are dying suddenly. How long can a person stay awake and how harmful is it? Why does sleep reduce sudden death, and does dreaming belong to high-quality sleep?
On November 5, 2021, 36-year-old Wang Jianglong (pseudonym) was found dead suddenly in a rental house. After a deeper understanding, the police found that Wang Jianglong's death had a lot to do with the long-term night shift. After a long night shift, the body of the deceased also sent obvious signals, but because of his own lack of attention, it led to the tragedy.
Wang Jianglong has been working in an automobile factory for more than ten years, and his working hours have been relatively stable. However, in July this year, he was suddenly transferred to a logistics position with a high work intensity, and the working hours became the day shift of the previous month and the night shift of the previous month.
October happened to be the month when Wang Jianglong went to work the night shift, and the police found that in the whole of October, he only had no clock record on October 1 and 3, and from October 4, he began to work the night shift. Clock in every day at around 7:30 p.m. and leave at around 8 a.m. the next morning.
Wang Jianglong's punch card record
In fact, Wang Jianglong also understands that he is no longer a young man in his 20s, and under the long-term high-intensity work and irregular life schedule, his body has obvious danger signals. According to Wang Jianglong's family, "He is about one meter and seven meters tall, not fat, often doing physical work, and looks very strong." But he said this year that his blood pressure was a bit high and sometimes he felt out of breath. ”
After working overtime all night, many people can't sleep after sleeping for four or five hours during the day, feeling that they are not sleepy at all, but the whole body feels powerless, easy to thirst, and the head is groggy. This is actually the result of sleep deprivation.
Studies have found that our brain produces metabolic waste when thinking, and these metabolic wastes accumulate in the blood vessels of the brain, which will cause the brain to have difficulty supplying blood, so after a long time of work and study, the brain will be groggy, which is the performance that needs to rest.
Sleep, on the other hand, is just the right thing to efficiently remove metabolic waste products from the brain and thus rejuvenate. Because the brain can secrete a body fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. During sleep, the intercellular space of the brain is larger than when awake, which means that the cerebrospinal fluid is more likely to wash away metabolic waste during sleep, like giving the brain a bath.
Comparison of cerebrospinal fluid in awake and sleep states
Based on the importance of sleep, some people have done a "sleep deprivation experiment" to figure out how long a person can not sleep at most. Randy Gardner, an American high school student, with the help of her classmates, kept up sleep for 264 hours from December 28, 1963 to January 8, 1964, breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest stay awake while completing sleep deprivation experiments.
Randy Gardner
During those 11 days, Randy wasn't alive and well.
After staying awake for 2 days, his mood began to become irritable, and then nausea appeared. Then the memory went wrong, and the TV couldn't be watched.
On day 4, he had the illusion that as a white man he always considered himself a black football player and said his friends were racist.
On day 7, Randy was shaking and started talking to himself, and the researchers couldn't hear what he was saying, when it was predicted that he would go insane.
By day 11, he still hadn't fallen asleep, but his brain's memory had deteriorated badly. The researchers asked him to repeatedly subtract 7 from 100 to calculate the value, and when he reached 65, he stopped, as if his brain had stopped moving and did not know what he was doing. Fortunately, after treatment, Randy slept peacefully and did not face any danger to her life.
Don't look at the American guy who can not sleep for 11 days without sudden death, it seems that we can do it, but our ordinary people's ability to bear it is not so strong.
The first is the difference in age, in general, most people have some unhealthy habits to a greater or lesser extent, such as: smoking, drinking, staying up late and so on. These bad habits will increase the pressure on human organs, and as they age, the organ's ability to withstand it decreases dramatically, so they are not able to stay up late when they are older.
Coupled with the fact that ordinary people usually need to work and study, the brain consumption is definitely much greater than doing nothing. It is also impossible for us to have a doctor around every day to observe the changes in the body at any time, as we do experiments, and to carry out timely and professional rescue of people who have died suddenly.
The effective rescue time of sudden death is very short, and sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the most common condition, accounting for more than 57% of all cases, and it will die without timely rescue within 1 hour after the onset of the disease. If you count the time it takes to find the patient sick and take him to the hospital, how much time is left for the doctor to rescue? Therefore, in order to prevent the risk of sudden death, it is necessary to clarify the cause of sudden death in advance and supplement sleep in time.
Among the causes of sudden death, coronary heart disease accounts for more than 30%. Coronary heart disease is also called "ventricular fibrillation", many people who have experienced it say, "it's like the heart is stinging", what is the cause of this?
Taking sleep deprivation as an example, due to excessive use of the brain, the oxygen content in the body is insufficient, and the amount of blood that the brain needs to replenish will gradually increase. But the heart's ability to transport blood is limited, it acts like a sponge, and to squeeze out more water, it needs to apply more force to squeeze.
In the process, the heart contracts sharply, and many people also feel chest pain, feeling like they have been hammered, or like a large rock stuck in the chest. Chest pain generally occurs behind the sternum, the entire boundary is not very clear, the size is similar to the palm of the hand, sometimes it is not clear which pain, but it is uncomfortable to feel the heart.
In addition, long-term excessive staying up late and exhausting the body's energy, people's mood will become very poor, resulting in violent fluctuations in blood pressure, which is easy to be provoked. Not only does it increase the risk of inducing cerebral infarction, but it also causes varying amounts of damage to the human heart and other organs.
According to statistics, sudden death caused by emotional agitation and overwork accounts for half of all cases.
Nowadays, the population of sudden death has a trend of rejuvenation, and more and more young people are on the verge of various cardiovascular disease outbreaks because of overtime work and staying up late. What we can do about this is actually very simple, first of all, we must maintain high-quality sleep.
High-quality sleep is also called deep sleep, in the deep sleep stage, people's ability to perceive the surrounding stimuli is weakened, it is not easy to be woken up, is the stage of physical recovery.
Many people think of dreaming as a standard for quality sleep, which is actually inaccurate. "A night without dreams" is a kind of high-quality sleep, when the brain cells almost all enter a rest state, at this time people do not have any anxiety, so all aspects of the function have been restored.
This is not to say that all dreams are bad, after all, dreams are also divided into dreams and nightmares. First of all, let's talk about how dreams are generated, after entering the sleep phase, our eyeballs move rapidly under the eyelids, and at the same time, the areas of the brain responsible for vision are very active. So we produce a strong visual image, and this image is presented in the form of a dream.
When you have a good dream, you will be immersed in the dream, and this state is like drinking a little wine, or basking in the sun in the bright spring, giving people a comfortable feeling. In this state, our brains consume a little more oxygen and energy, similar to the amount of walking after a meal.
However, once you have nightmares, there are more active brain cells, and people's consciousness will be more awake, so some people think that nightmares are very real. Since in the nightmare, we see something scared or physically injured, so the nerves and body instinctively direct themselves to move. Although in reality, people lying in bed can hardly exercise, they often wake up with soreness all over their bodies.
So how do you avoid nightmares? Logically, nightmares are caused by excessive stress in life or poor emotions, so they need to be self-regulated through life. However, some tips can also be effective in reducing the frequency of nightmares.
1. Take a hot bath before going to bed
Taking a hot bath an hour before going to bed can not only relax your body and mind well, but also make yourself feel drowsy after the body temperature rises, and then the process of falling will make you sleepy.
When sleeping, do not put your hands on your chest
When the chest is compressed, it will feel that the heart activity is blocked and breathing is difficult, and after this feeling is transmitted to the brain, it will stimulate the cerebral cortex and produce adverse reactions.
3. Drink milk before going to bed
Milk contains tryptophan, which can promote the secretion of brain cells, thereby producing serotonin that makes it easy to fall asleep, and there is also a peptide with physiological regulatory functions in milk, which can be combined with the central nervous system to produce a certain hypnotic effect.