ABSTRACT
Physicians indicate three fundamental elements that are key to good health: sound nutrition, regular physical exercise, and sleep of satisfying quality. The average person spends a third of their life asleep. Sleep experts and researchers link sleep deprivation to a variety of medical problems: decrease of cognitive faculties, degenerative diseases of the brain, high blood pressure, weight gain, heart and blood vessel diseases, weakening of the immune system, mental stress, depression, and more. The assumption was that when a person sleeps, he or she is dead; when they awaken, they return to life. In 1830, Robert Macnish, a Scottish doctor, surgeon, and author, published The Philosophy of Sleep, in which he wrote that sleep is an intermediate state between wakefulness and death. The general consensus among researchers is that sleep is the time in which the brain repairs itself, goes through a reboot of sorts, and processes the vast amount of information it has absorbed during the day.
