“Whatever the functions of sleep are, they seem to be so important that evolution is willing to put us in that place of potential danger by losing consciousness,” said Matthew Walker, a professor at University of California, Berkeley. Despite the best efforts of many top scientists, it has proven difficult to figure out what exactly it is about sleep that makes it so essential and worth the risk, in evolutionary terms.
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We know that we eat to give our bodies energy, we drink to stay hydrated, and we procreate to continue our species. For a long time scientists believed we slept simply to rest our tired bodies, however, we are starting to understand that sleep serves a whole variety of purposes. While some reasons we need to sleep remain a mystery, we do know that sleep is an anabolic process - one that rebuilds, repairs, and restores our body’s energy supplies after a long day. As you might guess, lack of sleep due to sleep disorders or other sleep problems can have a severely negative effect on your overall health.
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One thing is clear from years of scientific research and sleep studies - getting enough sleep is essential, and sleep problems and sleep disorders can be extremely detrimental to your overall health and wellbeing. For instance, in the 1960’s a group of scientists performed a series of sleep studies on rats that involved total sleep deprivation. After only five days without sleep the rats started dying. They learned that sleep is as essential as food or oxygen, because those rats succumbed to sleep deprivation just as quickly as they would have from starvation.
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