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We actually don't know the function of sleep all that well yet, but sleep is a time of quiescence in the brain.

Shelby Harris

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Shelby Harris
Age: 33
Born: 1991
Born: August 11
American Football Player
Football Player
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Actually
Wells
Well
Time
Function
Sleep
Brain

More quotes by Shelby Harris

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Night terrors are very different from nightmares. A lot of people will think they're the same, but they're really not. Night terrors - you want to look at the time of night when you're having the problem. Night Terrors happen in deep sleep. Nightmares tend to happen in a lighter REM sleep.
Shelby Harris
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So we go through in the beginning of the night, we go into the really deep stages of sleep and we actually cycle through. So, when you go down to the deep stage, then you go back up and you actually come into something called REM sleep, which is after about 90 minutes.
Shelby Harris
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We've looked at sleep diaries of patients with insomnia, and they'll say that they don't sleep for one or two days. And the body actually has a natural function, after about the third day to start catching up and you get a little bit more sleep the third night. And that's usually what I tell my patients.
Shelby Harris
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So there's a few different ways that we treat insomnia. The first thing that we always do is we look at the cause.
Shelby Harris
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There's a new line of research showing that people who don't get enough sleep, they're body doesn't metabolize as well. And so they actually - it leads to weight gain. So if you're not getting enough sleep, you might have difficulty losing weight.
Shelby Harris
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So you have it, you awaken from it and you can recall, in detail, what just happened, that's a nightmare. So it's very different from a dream where you generally don't wake up from it and you don't have this dysphoric emotion.
Shelby Harris
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So if somebody has chronic pain, we want to manage the pain, but we still want to treat the insomnia separately. So what we'll tend to do in our sleep lab is we'll do a thorough evaluation and we usually have myself, who is a Psychologist and a Sleep Behavioral Sleep Specialist, I treat the patients first.
Shelby Harris
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For some people they say, it's about wish fulfillment, it's about the things you are never able to do in your day you are actually fulfilling at night. There are other people who will say that it's actually telling you something.
Shelby Harris
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There's a problem for them [teens] when they have to get up and go to school in the morning, they're very sleepy, yet on the weekends, they'll sleep 12 hours, they'll sleep late and then go to bed late and wake up late. And on vacations, it's not a problem.
Shelby Harris
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People tend to remember their dreams in the morning a little bit better and if earlier in the night, when you're in a lot of deep sleep, if someone wakes you, or the phone rings or something, you're really confused.
Shelby Harris
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So a lot of people who work rotating shifts and they work at night, their bodies are set to want to be awake during the day and sleep at night. So there are some people who have a lot of trouble adjusting their rhythms and they have trouble working the night shift, they're sleepy, they're drowsy driving home.
Shelby Harris
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Now narcolepsy is really hard though because they're very tired during the day, they're sleepy during the day and it's managed mostly with medications. So we use medications to help them sleep better at night and to stay away during the day. But there are behavioral things you can do also by changing diet, exercise, having an actual nap schedule.
Shelby Harris
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Now circadian rhythms become very interesting and problematic for patients because when you become a teenager, your rhythms actually tend to naturally shift.
Shelby Harris
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When it comes to the reason why we have nightmares, we're still debating that. It's a new area of research, nightmares. And the way I like to think about it is, our brain - we have stress during the day and our brain needs to learn to process this stress.
Shelby Harris
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I'll work on patient's thoughts about sleep, So I must get eight hours of sleep tonight or I won't sleep tomorrow. That sometimes - or I won't function tomorrow. That sometimes makes it very difficult for you to sleep at night
Shelby Harris
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There are people who have repetitive nightmares. And what happens is their brain is trying to process the stress and help their brain actually deal with what happens if this stress happens again, so their brain's preparing them to deal with it in case the stress happens again, but it's so scary that they awaken from it.
Shelby Harris
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So you have Sleep Stage One, Two, and then Three/Four. One is a little bit lighter stage of the quiet, non-REM sleep and then Three/Four is really deep, deep sleep. And what you want is, you actually want a number of - you want to go through all of these stages throughout the night.
Shelby Harris
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There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing. They are just a way of your brain processing what's happening during the day, but there's really no meaning to them a lot of imagery of just flashes of what happened.
Shelby Harris
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So people only focus on getting the really deep sleep, but in reality, we spend almost 60% of the night in the stage two sleep.
Shelby Harris
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Decrements in attention and concentration, being able to learn more efficiently, that's just not as good. Also, there are motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, we see that a lot.
Shelby Harris