Sleep is important for children
Why does your body need sleep?
If you're twelve, you've slept through at least four years of your life so far. That sounds crazy, doesn't it? Sleeping is especially important for you as a child, because it allows your body to do things that it doesn't have time to do when you're awake.
Sleep makes you great
While you sleep, your body produces a particularly large amount of an important substance: the growth hormone somatropin. This ensures that your body parts (such as your arms and legs) and your organs (such as your heart or lungs) grow a little bit every night. In adults, the growth hormone is also released at night, but their whole body no longer grows, but rather their hair and fingernails, for example.
Sleep makes you smart
During the day, your brain is constantly in action: it has to absorb everything you see, hear, experience and learn. That's why all this information and impressions are first packed into a kind of temporary storage place, the hippocampus. Only when you sleep does your brain get round to tidying up and sorting everything: Unimportant and familiar information is deleted, while your brain packs important information into long-term memory - in the cerebral cortex.
Do you recognise this? Sometimes you just can't remember a new word, but after you've slept on it once, it's suddenly memorised in your brain. Now you know why: you learn in your sleep!
More information about sleep
(age and recommended sleep per day)
- 0 - 3 months: 14 - 17 hours
- 4 - 11 months: 12 - 16 hours
- 1 - 2 years: 11 - 14 hours
- 3 - 5 years: 10 - 13 hours
- 6 - 12 years: 9 - 12 hours
- 13 - 18 years: 8 - 10 hours
Most adults need around seven to eight hours of sleep per night. Tips and information on sleep problems can be found on the SRF programme «Puls» and at Zurich University Hospital.
Sleep makes you healthy
When you are ill, you are often particularly tired and want to sleep all the time. This is because your immune system needs rest so that it can work properly. So if you sleep a lot, your body is best able to fight off pathogens and you will recover more quickly. And even when you are fit again, your immune system works a lot while you sleep and ensures that you don't get sick again straight away.
So you see, it's not that we don't do anything while we sleep, but that our body works at full speed every night.
By the way: Exactly how many hours of sleep we need varies from person to person.
