Sleep is a physiological human need, just like hunger or thirst. If you deprive a person of sleep, he will eventually die. In ancient times, people considered sleep to be a semblance of death – after all, when a person went to bed, closed his eyes, his breathing became less frequent and his reaction to external stimuli decreased.
No wonder in ancient Greek mythology the god of sleep Hypnos and the god of death Thanatos were twin brothers. For thousands of years, people have thought that the primary function of sleep is rest.
However, with the invention in 1928 of the electroencephalograph, a device that records the electrical activity of the brain, and the discovery in 1953 of the rapid eye movement sleep phase, scientists realized that sleep is not a monotonous state, but an active process with many functions.

We still do not know all the functions of sleep. But forced or deliberate restriction of sleep seriously affects a person’s mental and physical health. No wonder in China sleep deprivation was considered one of the most terrible punishments. The Guinness Book of Records does not record experiments with deliberate sleep deprivation, considering them deadly. The currently scientifically and documented record for the maximum stay awake belongs to Randy Gardner, who in 1963 stayed awake in a row, without using any stimulants, for 260 hours and 17 minutes (11 days).

Even after one sleepless night, which happened in almost every person’s life, fatigue appears, concentration of attention decreases, difficulties arise with complex activities. If you do not sleep for 2-3 nights, then coordination of movements and focusing of vision are impaired. In the future, irritability, slowing down of movements, blurred speech, hallucinations, and strange behavior appear. A person cannot maintain a conversation, becomes indifferent to the world around him, difficulties arise in performing the simplest everyday skills … All this only confirms that high-quality sleep is extremely necessary for our body.