TIL: What Would Happen If You Just Stayed In Bed Forever!?

You've probably all dreamed about it - spending the whole day in bed.

It's just too tempting to spend the day cuddled up in a blanket, binge-watching your favorite TV show and eating Pizza Delivery - especially when it's starting to get cold outside.

With everything is getting more and more electronic, people need to use their bodies less and less -

You can now order food or get something that you only have to "cook" in the microwave, you can deliver groceries to your house and thanks to skype, you don't even have to leave your apartment to talk to someone or have a meeting.

People are getting more and more lazy - no doubt about that.

But what would happen to your body if you actually never left the bed?

Some have experienced this due to an illness, and it's not as fun as it sounds!

The most obvious effect that you have probably guessed already, is that your muscle strength would dramatically decrease.

When you are at complete rest and don't use your muscles at all, they would lose up to 15% of their strength each week.
So after only 3-5 weeks of bed rest, your muscles would have lost about HALF of their original strength!

Total bed rest is also very bad for your stamina.

No matter how fit or un-fit you were before, it can always get worse.
Your endurance would be so low that even small physical activities like walking up the stairs or a few seconds of sprinting could lead to major fatigue - which in turn results to even more inactivity.

Your bones and muscles would actually decrease in mass too.

Especially your thigh muscles would actually lose 3% of their mass within only one week!
And your bone density can be reduced to 50% of its original mass within 3 months.
This is caused by a process called Bone Resorption, which breaks down the bone, and that will eventually become faster than the speed of new bone growth if you keep being inactive.

Also, your skin would suffer from the constant pressure.

This is called a "Bedsore" or "Pressure Sore". It often happens to bony areas that are covered with skin but not a lot of tissue, for example your tailbone or shoulder blades.
Usually, people who have a conditions that limits their ability to stand up or change the lying position develop bedsores.
It means that the blood flow to your skin and tissue is being decreased by the constant pressure of your own body weight.
This results in skin injuries, and ultimately the cells can die from the lack of nutrients they'd usually receive from the blood.

Your cardiovascular system also changes with constant bed rest - maybe the most dangerous symptoms of them all.

Your resting heart rate increases 4-15 beats within the first few weeks (then, it stays stagnant on that level.)
And the blood volume decreases dramatically: Within 24 hours you lose 5% of it, within 6 days 10%, and within 14 days you will have lost 20% of your body's blood volume.
Less blood volume also means that there is less oxygen to be transported to your cells - resulting in even more fatigue.

As you can see, lots of these symptoms lead to a vicious cycle.

And all of this is of course apart from the mental effects - isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, lack of motivation and helplessness.

As you can see, our body needs a certain amount of physical exercise despite modern technology making us more lazy - otherwise our abilities and health will decrease dramatically.

Images: 1, 2, 3, Logo by @profitgenerator, Sources: 1, 2

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