Goodbye, on a sad note

Saying goodbye is not the most pleasant thing.I always find the word pretentious if you are saying it to a person dear to you.Never convenient to say it; 'Cause wen you say it the other person realizes that what he is leaving behind is far more precious than what he is leaving it for. It can fill people with unaccounted emotions which can handicap their thoughts in a strange place.As long as you can say goodbye and not mean it, will the departed feel secure.

zzzz...zzz

zzz...zzz..

Sleep is one of the most essential things which a man requires to complete his day...the absoute essential. I mean he can do without water for a day, without food for a couple of days, but if he is sleep deprived for even a single day, he cant function properly.
Now I've seen a lot of people crib about the amount of sleep they get in their daily lives."oh!..I can sleep for hours if I get the time" said one of my batchmates when I asked him. Then there was "Sleeping and eating are my favourite hobbies"...my philosophy a couple of years ago!!..and the classic favorite "I cant wait for the weekend so I can sleep throughout the day and replenish my sleep"...the corporates, the overworked middle class and the school and college goers quoted verebatim.So is sleeping more, a solution to this problem.The answer is no. After three years of experimenting with taking extra naps in and in between lectures,sleeping in the 2 hour bus journey from thane to andheri and back(around 2 years back) and sleeping long hours in the hostel and making it just in time to my classroom to get attendance, I've discovered that the more naps you take the sleepier you feel. No amount of sleep that I took has ever seemed to replenish my sleep deficit. Once I slept for 19 hours straight.I got up only to have a snackk and then resumed my sleep for another 4 hours.But after that when I got up, I still felt lazy and wanted to keep my eyes shut. This event even popularized me as "the animal" in my family circles when my tales were openly discussed in family gatherings.
So after a series of these drastic experimentations, I decided to do a little bit of reading and understand what sleep was all about and how could I minimize it without feeling the strain. Whatever follows can be quite beneficial to all those who keep complaining about getting little sleep.(hostelites please read ahead).
Before I talk about the stages of sleeps, I want you to know that the state of our mind can be gauged by the brain waves(measured by an EEG). High frequency brain waves indicate an active state of mind and vice versa. Now , there are 5 stages of the sleep cycle and the stage when we are awake:

1.Awake:- This phase is characterized by the brain emitting high frequency brain waves called beta waves. This is the time when our brain is highly active and is exhibited
when we are awake.This is 65% of our day normally otherwise 10%, if I take my case.

2.Stage 1:- This phase is charcterized by slightly lower brain waves called Alpha waves along with some theta waves.We exhibit Alpha waves while we are still very awake.
Stage 1 happens right at the time when we are about the fall asleep. I have personally experienced this in some boring lectures in which my mind used to drift away, the voice of the lecturer used to become fainter by the minute and my handwriting used to become an unidentifiable scrawl and I used to wake up only when my pen used to fall off my hands or due to a sudden silence which was generally when a question was asked.The heartbeat and the body temperatures dip slightly in this phase.

3.Stage 2:- This is the next phase of sleep in which the body temperature and the heartbeat dips further. This phase is characterized by patterns of brain waves called sleep spindles and k-complexes which indicate a sudden burst of brain activity. Several times I fell asleep on the front seat of my car reading a subject book.When my father used to poke me from behind in an attempt to wake me up, I used to complain that I had just fallen asleep while revising. This is the same thing which people, who are woken up from stage 2 of sleep, have got to say.

4.Stage 3 & 4:- During these stages the brain emits the lowest frequency brain waves called the delta waves.The mind oscillates between emitting delta and theta brain waves.In these phases we are truly asleep and don't wake up.These stages are called as the deep sleep and in these phases our respiration rate, heartbeat rate, body temperature is the lowest.The blood stored in the organs is diverted to the muscles and tissues to repair and nourish them.

5.Stage 5(REM):- The most interesting phase of the sleep cycle is the Rapid Eye Movement phase in which the person actually dreams. In this phase instead of the brain waves becoming lower , they anomolously become higher and resemble the beta waves(which are emitted in the fully awake stage).This is because the dreams that we see require an active participation of the brain. This happens to such an extent that we almost feel as if the dreams are real.

Now, what I mean by the sleep cycle is that these stages keep repeating in this pattern throughout our sleep. As the night proceeds the REM stage keeps getting bigger and the DEEP SLEEP stage keeps getting shorter in every cycle. Whenever we get up during our sleep in the middle of the night, it is possibly at the end of a sleep cycle in stage 2 or REM SLEEP.
So, what is quality sleep? and how can one attain it? To answer this let me introduce you to someting called as the system/biological clock. This is perhaps one of the things in our body which faces a serious loss of identity with the kind of routine which we regularly follow. The system clock follows the circadian rythm(body temperature cycle). Our body temeprature is not constant and keeps increasing throughout the day and falls after the sunset steadily. This in combination with the melatonin levels in the body(which increases after sunset) make the body feel tired and weary in the night time and active in the morning time.
To attain quality sleep we have to complete the body's quota of deep sleep(24% of our sleep) and the REM phase (25% of our sleep).If we are deprived of deep sleep we experience muscle aches, head aches, drowsiness, nausea etc throughout the day.If we are deprived of this stage, the body sacrifices all other stages to gain back deep sleep.On the other hand , a lack of REM sleep can cause creative imparments and an inability to concentrate during the day.

So this is what you should do to get quality sleep:
The number of hours we sleep does not govern the quality of sleep but it all depends on sufficing the deep sleep and the rem phase of sleep.Following the system clock can act as the first step in attaining quality sleep.
Getting a good exposure to sunlight also helps in attaining quality sleep.The sunlight controls the melatonin levels in the body.The lack of sunlight results in high melatonin levels which causes drowsiness and tiredness. Many people which are aware of this fact have installed artificial bright lights in their work area to keep drowsiness at bay.
The third thing which can be done is to provide sufficient excercise to the body. This helps the body temperatures to peak at the right times of the day and drop easily during the night making the person fall asleep easily.
Taking a short nap of around 45 minutes in the day time right after lunch also helps.The body temperature anomolously dips during this time and naturally the person feels drowsy.The trick is to wake up right before getting into the deep sleep stage.

If these tips are followed properly, it can result in your sleep requirements being reduced from 8 hours a day to a meagre 5 hours without getting a feeling of restlessness, irritability or drowsiness. However, I still dont take any guarantees as this experiment failed in my case. But i hope you get better results!!