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Sleep

Franco Zecchin

The sleep, a natural activity, a daily experience, is an enigma, in the physiologic point of view and because it is ours stranger familiar companion all the life long. We are little caring of a phenomenon that take one third of the everyone existence. We are absorbed by a culture of waking up as a promise of renewal. The way as we are is revealed by our sleep. Sleeping, we come back to the minimum common denomination of our one's physiologic being, to a body that become place, residence. To sleep means to find a place, do not move, almost for a night. As nomadic as can be a people or a person, the sleep fix ourselves for some hours to the same place, the place occupied by our sleeping-bag, our hammock, our bed or simply our body. The modernity separate private and public spaces; the rich street life of European cities is finished. Who use towns or fields as places for the sleep, is drifting in some ways, is abandoned as a drop-out. The public sleeper offer his face to the passer-by, his body adapt to the ground, he cut an essential refuge and impose his sleep to the circumstances. His posture express his victory on the situation. Some biologic functions of the sleep are still incomprehensible to science. Different hypothesis are open: we sleep to rest, to economize energy night-time, to stabilize the neuronal circuits of the memory, to allow the maintenance done by our organism on himself. The sleep have a crucial importance in the human life, but man is sleeping less and less: 9 hours a day in the last century, today the average has fall to 7.5 hours. Artificial lights, television, computer, internet, as others technologies, push to alter and short ours sleep rhythms. If we add the work stress, the noise, the social and economical transformations we can realise why there are more and more sleep pathologies. In the USA, the National Sleep Foundation researches shown that 64% of inhabitants sleep less than necessary, 32% of cases less than 6 hours by night. The consequences of lack of sleep are 100.000 car accidents every year, with 1.500 death people and 71.000 blessed caused by the numbed reflex of the drivers. The lack of sleep can explain tragedies as the Challenger destruction, the explosion of the Chernobil nuclear plant, the ecological disaster caused by the Exxon Valdez. A sacrificed and disturbed sleep is bad for the health. After 3 weeks of experimental sleepiness induced on mouses, they fall ill and die for infection. Sleeping well contribute to improve the quality of our life. The quality of the sleep is not only depending by his length, but also by his intensity and stability. In normal conditions, 200 micro-waking up are necessary during the night. We don't realise it, they lasts some ten seconds. They need to watch and keep under control our organism. But when disturbing elements take part in, the micro-waking can grow to 600 a night. The sleep loose his stability, his quality is damaging, and the day after we fell tired and sleeping. Sleep-apnea, narcolessia, sleepiness... 50% of the population is suffering for some sleep alteration disease. Every single case of sleepiness must be cared by operating on their specific causes. It is generally better to privilege behaviour therapies to drugs. To avoid the exiting substances use, to limit the bed utilisation only to the sleep, to go to bed and weak-up always at the same time, to avoid the room over-heating. The hypnotic drugs are useful, but in long period they loose efficiency and create dependence. The Melatonine effect, limited to some few ten minutes, is useful only to normalise the sleep-wakefulness phases.



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