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Sleep is an incredibly complex process that affects virtually all systems of the body. It serves an essential biological function, and it is fundamental to well-being. Without enough rest, you may see short-term health problems such as impaired memory and lack of alertness. If you experience too much sleep deprivation, you may start seeing long-term and serious health problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, or depression. That is why getting a good night’s sleep should be your priority.

It's the end of a long week, and you want nothing more than to fall on your bed and call it a day. However, you sit in front of the glowing screens of your laptop or television and rewatch the first season of your favourite TV show. Or you grab your favourite book and read a few chapters. Or you scroll through your favourite social media app, checking what your friends are doing.

Getting enough water every day is important to your wellbeing and necessary for your organ functions. In the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the human adult body is composed of 60% water. Your brain, kidneys, heart and lungs need around 80% of water to function, and your skin needs to be composed of 75% water to maintain its elasticity. As your breathing, digestion, and waste removal depend on your constant rehydration, it is no wonder that you feel lethargic when you're thirsty. Many experts also go as far as saying that you need water more than food if you're lost in the wilderness.

Since the 2020 pandemic began, more people have reported experiencing more sleep issues, with the necessary medication prescriptions increasing by 20%. As the vaccination programmes are ongoing all over the globe, many people are in between a rock and a hard place.

You are undoubtedly familiar with the feeling of thirst: the parched feeling at the back of your throat and the need to drench that dryness with cool and refreshing water. Especially on humid and physically demanding days, it is severely tempting to guzzle water.

In Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1840), there is a sentence that suggests that people used to sleep for two separate sleep periods. The text reads:

“He knew this, even in the horror with which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream.”

Sleeping between six to nine hours every night is a restful and restorative activity for people of all ages. Not only is this activity essential for growing children, but also for adults who have daily responsibilities to their family and work. However, modern life in a post-pandemic world, means that many of us do not get the high-quality sleep that we need.

In 2022’s The YouGov Sleep Study, researchers found that an average person (age 18 or older) gets about 6.66 hours of sleep every night. While city-dwellers tend to get less sleep than those living in rural areas, the numbers are still close to the bare minimum hours of sleep the body needs.

When the sun goes down, experts have noticed that your circadian clock readies your body for bed around two hours before you go to sleep. The more scientific name of circadian rhythm is actually the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). This is a cluster of cells in your brain, directly connected to your retina that wakes you up or makes you drowsy depending on the amount of light in the room. That is also why you may have a difficult time falling asleep when the lights are left on at night.

Our bodies are very complex structures, and turning all of it off for sleep requires effort. In short, we actually have to work at getting rest, and the key to getting there faster has been the challenge that the sleep industry has worked towards solving ever since their inception.

There are plenty of factors that can help or prevent you from getting good sleep - diet, sleeping issues, psychological state - and each industry tries to solve this problem in their own way. One common solution is simply affecting the temperature of the sleeper when they fall asleep, but this isn’t as easy as you may think.

Do you know what goes up and down without having to move? Something we have but rarely notice?

In the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives, we are more often than not, simply attentive to details that we consider important or see as a priority. As the riddle implies, monitoring our body temperature is not always top-of-mind when it comes to improving our physical health, nor is it a daily element we think of.

The only time we ever pay attention to our body temperature is when we feel our body shiver from an oncoming fever.