Doctors and holistic practitioners discuss why sleep is essential to living and the dire effects of not resting well, reports SRQ.

SRQ: What are some of the most common problems you see in terms of sleep?Dr. Matthew Edlund (Director, Center for Circadian Medicine): Sleep is a big part of public health. The real question is: What is sleep for? My belief is that it is to rebuild the body. We have this idea that health likens us to machines. Illness is when we break down. What really happens is we fail to rebuild and that’s the basis of illness. And why is sleep critical to that? A large part of human regeneration takes place in sleep. Sleep is like food. If you don’t sleep, you don’t live. Very special things happen: the brain reorganizes, memory and cognition—everything gets redone and replaced. The beauty is when you wake up each morning you’re partially reborn and remade. And one of the big problems is, as times have changed, as we’ve moved to different kinds of social media and different ways of life, a lot of people have forgotten how to sleep.