Or dance to sleep
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
6 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43408 readers
1983 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
You know, this is a good question.
Googling it would ruin the fun, but I'd assume that it's an evolutionary thing so you don't decide to go to sleep in an unsafe situation and get yourself eaten.
I bet you’re right. It also probably has to do with shutting down/pausing brain function to enter our “sleep mode”. Though I have no clue what I’m talking about so take it with a grain of salt
After a quick google myself, it looks like this is basically it. There wasn’t a whole lot of info but from what I could find our body needs a way to make sure we don’t do something stupid like sleep while standing up or in danger. This means it’s up to our body to let us sleep rather than letting our consciousness decide.
But we (and other animals) don't just fall asleep involuntarily? We do decide to (go to) sleep. I know I missed your question with this take.
Maybe it's a bit like when we try to focus to learn something. We have to create a situation which supports that desired brain activity, and control our attention. In both cases, we want to minimize distractions.
So I guess one answer to your question is: Because sleep is not a simple activity like watching TV or riding a bike, which we could switch to in an instant. Sleep is a state of mind (and much more physiologically), which requires a certain environment, relaxation and time to transition.
Falling is dangerous. I prefer to drift off.