New evidence shows how sleep balances hormones and boosts immunity, among other things
By THIS IS A PREVIEW.or to access the full article.Already a subscriber or purchased this issue?“Do I really need to sleep?” As I travel around the world talking about sleep, I am asked this question over and over. The answer has always been clear—yes, everyone needs to do it. Just like hunger, thirst and sexual desire, the urge to sleep is a physiological drive. Exactly what spending a third of our lives unconscious gets us, however, has long mystified scientists.
In acknowledging our lack of an answer, Allan Rechtschaffen, one of the world's foremost sleep researchers, said in 1978, “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the the evolutionary process has ever made” (emphasis mine). In the 1990s J. Allan Hobson, another leading sleep researcher, quipped that the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness.
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