Essay

SLEEP APNEA

Why people sleep, and how long someone can survive without it? How you ever wondered how many sleep hours a human need to keep the harmony between a healthy and an unhealthy life? One explanation “for this fact is that sleep is one of the human body’s biological rhythms, natural cycles of activity that the body must go through. Some biological rhythms… woman’s menstruation… shorter like the beat of the heart… others like the rise and fall of blood… and body temperature.” (Ciccarelli and White) Over the years scientifics have developed two theories about sleep, those theories are the adaptive theory and the restorative theory of sleep. The Adaptive Theory explains that sleep is part of evolution. “Animals and humans… sleep… to avoid predators… hunting time, which are generally at night… In fact… lions… sleep nearly 15 hours a day… gazelles that are prey sleep only a total of 4 hours…” (Ciccarelli and White). Meanwhile the Restorative Theory bases its facts in the necessity of sleep for body’s physical health. “During sleep, chemicals that were used up during the day’s activities are replenished and cellular damage is repaired. In fact children in periods of rapid growth need to sleep more…” (Ciccarelli and White) Sleep has four different stages; the most important stage is stage four. In stage four is when most of the cells reproduce and regenerate their chemical elements. The amount of hours needed differentiates between younger and older people. Younger people need to sleep more hours on the other hand, older people require less hours of sleep. On the first months of life is very important that newborns sleep for 16 hours, because at this age their bodies are developing.

In our society many people have develop many sleep disorders, due to a lack of good sleep habits. Perhaps modern life’s pace is too fast or maybe people are required to work more than one job, these and many others reasons have increase the number of patients with sleep disorders....