Things Your Body Does While Sleeping

Sleeping without a doubt is a necessary activity for us all. It’s part of our own survival and for many it’s their favourite thing to do. We’ve done plenty of research on sleep and have uncovered all kinds of benefits that sleep can do for us.

Most of which have uncovered the physical and mental benefits. However today, we want to prove to you that sleep is a little more active than we think.

After all, we think that sleep is just an activity where you rest, relax, and are inactive during the whole process. That isn’t the case at all when you consider the things we do while sleeping.

Temperature Drops

While the temperature in our rooms won’t change, we do experience a drop in body temperature while we are sleeping. This is because our muscles become inactive which in turn causes our body to burn less calories.

Our Eyes Still Move

Though most sleep with our eyes closed, they still move around in our sleep. In fact, depending on what sleep stage we’re in, our eyes will move in various ways. First, they roll and once we’re in deeper sleep, they will dart about and twitch. The reason most won’t know this is we don’t remember this.

Body Jerks

Quick twitches or sudden hypnic jerks are associated in the early stages of sleep. These are quite harmless, however they could get strong enough to wake us up.

Paralyzed Muscles

Every time we sleep, we undergo paralysis to some extent. Why we do this is because if our muscles were allowed to move freely, we’d be able to act our dreams. This is dangerous for a wide variety of reasons so it’s a good thing our body has them paralyzed during that time.

But Not Our Throat

While our muscles get paralyzed, one that doesn’t is our throat. This makes sense since we still need it to breathe which we do throughout the sleeping process. That being said, our throat does relax which causes our throat to narrow. This act may be one of the contributing factors to snoring.