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Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food. ...Hippocrates |
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A warm bath, reading, or another relaxing routine can make it easier to fall sleep. You can train yourself to associate certain restful activities with sleep and make them part of your bedtime ritual.
Sleep disorders and the resulting sleep deprivation interfere with work, driving, and social activities. The most common sleep disorders include insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and narcolepsy.
Circadian rhythms are regular changes in mental and physical characteristics that occur in the course of a day (circadian is Latin for "around a day"). Most circadian rhythms are controlled by the body's biological "clock."
Sleep and sleep-related problems play a role in a large number of human disorders and affect almost every field of medicine.
REM sleep stimulates the brain regions used in learning. This may be important for normal brain development during infancy, which would explain why infants spend much more time in REM sleep than adults