The Inactivity Theory Of Sleep Deprivation

Many people realize that sleep plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy body, but many times they put it at the bottom of their priority list due to the hectic life style of today’s society. It has been known that factors such as your health, age, gender, etc. have played a big influence on how much sleep you need in order to function well the following day. Scientist are now pointing at two factors that influence how much sleep you need: sleep need, the amount of sleep you need in order to function the best the following day and sleep debt, the amount of sleep you need to make up for that you lost out on during previous nights. Yet, that brings up the question, why can some people function so well after a night of five hours of sleep, …show more content…
As stated in a Harvard article, scientist have come up with four famous theories about why humans sleep, and not all are agreed upon if they are accurate. The first theory goes back to the evolutionary stance, and is called the inactivity theory. This goes back to when it was dark, and humans wanted to stay out of harm’s way, thus going to sleep allows them to stay have. Many people have countered this argument with the fact that you would be much safer being conscious, and being aware of your threats. Thus, making this one of the lesser accepted theories about why we sleep. The second theory scientist came up with is also related to evolution and is called the energy conservation theory. They believed that the primary reason humans slept was to conserve energy, especially during the times when it was hardest to find food. It was proven that while sleeping, your energy demand decreases, which made many people believe that this theory was correct. Then came the restorative theory, which changed the outlook on why people believed humans slept. Many people now believe that sleep allows the body to rejuvenate itself, and fix things that are not working correctly. There has been many studies done on this theory, which keep giving it more validity. The most recent theory that people are starting to believe is the brain plasticity theory, which states that sleep plays a key role in developing infant/kids brains, and also allowing adults to perform tasks at an efficient rate. By combining parts of these theories, one can start to understand that humans sleep due to the positive effects it has on all the processes that go on in the human