When You Can’t Sleep, How Good Is Lying in Bed With Your Eyes Closed?
The key differences between sleep and “quiet wakefulness”
Reddit is a great forum for raising scientific questions, but the fact that it’s discussion-based makes it difficult to know when a debate has settled on the best answer, objectively speaking. Exhibit A concerns the value of lying down with your eyes closed. How much does it do for you compared to actual sleep? The whole exercise can seem like a waste. Is it?
Part of what makes this question of sleep, but saying what sleep accomplishes is a far cry from identifying what sleep is . The distinction is important. If the point of sleep is that being inactive frees up our energy for other tasks (say, recovering from a cold), we might expect lying in bed with our eyes closed—what some studies call “”—to accomplish much the same thing.
