Sleep is as important as the food we eat, but we pay much less attention to our rest than to our diet. So, we take time away from our night's rest to work or have fun. We forget the rituals for a good sleep, such as slowing down the rhythms before bed. We fill our bedroom with televisions, smartphones, computers and the like, all tools that belong to the hours of activity. Sleep today is therefore neglected , often reduced to a disturbance within an existence that must be active and productive . The motto "he who sleeps does not catch fish" is valid and the most recent research tells us that night's rest has been reduced by about 40-60 minutes a day compared to thirty years ago .
We do not care about the quality of our sleep at least until the situation becomes unsustainable or we begin to pay the consequences of our sleep deficit. In fact, sleep deprivation causes cognitive difficulties . Furthermore, it affects our character, we become irritable and even our personal relationships worsen . We are less alert, our attention drops during the day and we become more sleepy with all the associated risks. If sleep deprivation is chronic, the risk of developing depression and serious pathologies such as tumors or cardiovascular diseases (strokes, heart attacks) increases. And let's remember that sleep debt is never fully recovered, especially if we do not intervene in time.
Yet, we continue to ask the same questions without investigating the possible answers. Questions like: “Why do we always feel tired? Why do we have trouble falling asleep or wake up all the time? How can we help our body rest?”
Antonella Viola, full professor of General Pathology at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padua, in her latest work entitled “ Il tempo del corpo ” (Feltrinelli, 2024, pp. 144, also e-book) tries to provide us with some guidelines to answer these questions. She thus introduces us to circadian rhythms , or the oscillations of physical and behavioral functions that follow the oldest and most wonderful clock in the world: the alternation of light and dark. Sleep, body temperature, hunger, immune defenses and even pain are all subject to this alternation. The adaptation of organisms to the time of day, as well as their rhythmic changes, has been documented for a long time, but only recently has science begun to understand how much circadian rhythms influence our well-being .
Sleep, so important for our health, is regulated by a circadian rhythm called the sleep-wake rhythm, closely linked to the alternation of light and dark. The synchronization of our biological clocks is therefore necessary to protect sleep and all the activities related to it, such as memory consolidation, that is, the process that transforms experience into memory. But it is not only the brain's memory that consolidates while we sleep: even immunological memory, which allows us to defend ourselves from viruses and bacteria, matures during rest, and it is no coincidence that sleep loss is associated with greater susceptibility to infections.
We must therefore learn or relearn to organize our days according to biological time , so as to grant our body the hours of rest it happily needs. We must grant ourselves a time of relaxation and even magic, in which our entire organism resets and prepares for new challenges. Sleep is, in fact, anything but absolute quiet. It is a space of time in which the body and mind lay new foundations and then set off again with an extra gear. And it is a space in which we can all let ourselves go, without constraints, as William Dement, a pioneer of sleep studies, wrote in his book The Secrets of Sleep: "During the night we traverse a vast landscape of dream and non-dream realms, completely unaware of the world around us until, only after several hours, at sunrise we are brought back to our bodies and to a waking awareness. Without remembering almost a thing."