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Asked by drew520tots on 27 Jun 2025.
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Katie Rutterford answered on 27 Jun 2025:
No, your heart is always pumping blood around your body and is an automatic process you don’t need to think about! It is just as important to work when you are sleeping as this is when important things such as memory processing are happening. Your body still does a lot of work when you are asleep.
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Comments
melissau commented on :
As Katie has explained, the heart is always pumping blood around the body, whether that’s for a human or for other animal species – the pumping motion of the heart is not something that is consciously controlled by the brain so being asleep doesn’t affect the heart’s ability to keep pumping. Generally, the rate at which the heart pumps is likely to be slower during sleep than when the animal is awake because the purpose of the heart pumping blood around the body is to get oxygen to the parts of the body which need it to work effectively, so if the animal or person is moving around or using up nervous energy (which means that adrenaline starts to be released, which affects the heart’s activity rate) then generally the heart will pump faster during waking times. Some animals hibernate (go into an extended state of very deep sleep for weeks or months) during the winter and through this period, their heart rate drops compared to when they’re awake and active but it’s still pumping throughout their hibernation period to enable them to stay healthy enough to wake up at the end of hibernation