What's it all about

I like to sleep, that’s why I opened this blog. I would even say sleeping is my hobby and is one of my very important needs. I’m always looking for good food and for enough sleep. As for daytime I’m a very active person, I don’t like to be tired at all.
In addition I’m notorious for falling asleep wherever I want or I can’t stay awake any longer. Even at places where most of the people can’t sleep like airplanes, cars that are going on rough roads, while sitting in a chair or lying on the floor, it’s no problem for me to fall asleep. If my body needs a rest, I wilingly give in. Even if that means, one moment I’m talking to a friend, the other moment I’m up and away ☺

For the beginning, I think I should talk about the sleeping basics:

Why do you need to sleep
Sleep is not a waste of time, it’s your deserved break. At the same time your body is not resting - it regenerats itself. On the one hand the metabolism will slow down, but on the other hand hormons are building muscles and strengthen bones, the immunsystem is regaining strength and the brain is processing the stimuli of the day.
You can experience that a regular sleep is even more important than eating and drinking. Even one sleepless night exhausts us, a longer period without sleep will affect our body and mind tremendously. In the mid 1960s a student stayed awake for 11 days in a sleeping labor. At the end he suffered from severe hallucinations.
The National Sleep Foundation in the United States says that seven to nine hours of sleep for an adult is optimal and that sufficient sleep benefits alertness, memory, problem solving, and overall health, as well as reducing the risk of accidents.
["Let Sleep Work for You" provided by the National Sleep Foundation"]
Additonally Professor Francesco Cappuccio said, "Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes, sometimes leading to mortality; but in contrast to the short sleep-mortality association, it appears that no potential mechanisms by which long sleep could be associated with increased mortality have yet been investigated. Some candidate causes for this include depression, low socioeconomic status, and cancer-related fatigue. …In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill health."
["Researchers say lack of sleep doubles risk of death… but so can too much sleep".
Jane E. Ferrie at al. "A prospective study of change in sleep duration; associations with mortality in the Whitehall II cohort." SLEEP Journal.]
Furthermore wound healing is affected by sleep. A study by Gumustekin et al. in 2004 shows sleep deprivation hindering the healing of burns on rats.
[Gumustekin, K. at al. (2004). "Effects of sleep deprivation, nicotine, and selenium on wound healing in rats" (Abstract). Int J Neurosci 2004;114(11): 1433-42.]

What happens when we’re sleeping?
Around every 90 minutes REM(Rapid Eye Movement)- or dreaming phases and phases of deep sleep (this phases are most important for your recovery) take turn. During the night the phases of deep sleep will decrease, the ones of dreaming will increase. If you don’t get enough phases of deep sleep your body will take what it needs during the next night.
Additionally we’ll wake up up to 30 times a night, but just for a short time which we don’t recognize. But if this wake phases exceed three minutes it could be hard to sleep again.
Seven and a half hour is the magic time for a healthy and long life, but there are people who’re allready feel rested after five hours. So sleep-scientists just refer to the feeling during the day, if you feel fresh and rested, you had enough sleep.
(If you want to read on you can visit Wikipedia or the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM))

Sleep debt
But today a lot of people don’t have a healthy sleep. We’re not physically working like our ancestors, hence we have enough energy to stay awake. And there is so much to do during the night, finishing the left overs of work, going to clubs, surfing through the internet, goingt to the late-night-show of the cinema - information overload and short nights result in poor sleep and fatigue all the time.
The scientist will talk about a chronical sleeping disorder if someone's sleeping too short and poorly (at least for four weeks) that he can’t be capable anymore. Insomnia leads to chronical stress which can affects the immunsystem but can also lead to cardiovascular disease. Moreover people who suffer sleeping disorders are anxious that they can’t fall asleep anymore, this stress prevent them from sleeping. So it’s not enough to take sleeping pills but to care for your mind as well.