Have you ever heard some ersatz over-achiever say, “sleep is
over-rated”? He was wrong. If anything, sleep is underrated. There is abundant
research to prove it. Like a lot of other stuff, we’ve learned what lack of
sleep can do the hard way by not getting enough of it.
You’ll Get a Dirty
Brain if You Don’t Sleep Enough
Dr. Maiken Nedergaard and associates at the University of
Rochester Medical Center discovered a system
that drains waste from the brain. While we sleep of course. Surrounding our
spinal column and brain is cerebrospinal fluid. This clear fluid flows through
channels in the brain, and the channels are controlled by glial cells. While we
sleep, the glial cells move the fluid around and, among other things, it seems
to remove beta-amyloid from brain tissue. If “beta-amyloid” rings a bell, it’s
because some researchers think it is involved in Alzheimer’s disease. We
clearly want that to be removed. If we don’t get sufficient sleep, we are
letting the sludge build up.
More bad news: according to a Harvard study, after a
short period of sleep deprivation, longer sleep (e.g.-10 hours) helps recovery.
But sustained stretches of reduced time of sleep, say, for shift workers who
have a hard time sleeping during the day, can’t be offset by a period of longer
sleep. From the report abstract: “Thus, the extended wake during the circadian
night reveals the cumulative detrimental effects of chronic sleep loss on
performance, with potential adverse health and safety consequences”.
Your Memory Won’t Be
Very Good Either
A research paper from the Department of Radiology at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, published in Nature Neuroscience
reported: “Evidence indicates that sleep after learning is critical for the
subsequent consolidation of memory.”
The paper went on to say:
These results demonstrated that an
absence of prior sleep substantially compromises the neural and behavioral
capacity for committing new experiences to memory. It therefore appears that
sleep before learning is critical in preparing the human brain for next-day
memory formation-a worrying finding considering society’s increasing erosion of
sleep time.
There is a lot of complexity around how the brain stores and
retrieves memories. But adequate sleep is clearly involved.
It Just Gets Worse
And from Dr.
JoAnn Manson, “We know that getting adequate sleep is linked to a lower
risk of having diabetes, insulin resistance, obesity, cardiovascular disease,
and even stress and depression”.
You Are a Diurnal
Circadian
Humans are circadian.
That is, we operate on twenty-four hour cycles. That is generally true even if
there is no light; however, our systems work a whole lot better when we are
exposed to light at the right time.
We are also diurnal-active
during the day. To get the circadian “rhythms” set correctly, exposure to
sunlight in the morning to wake us up, and then darkness to make us sleepy’.
There are some other artificial lights that do a good job of awakening us as
well. Similarly, to get our body clocks set on the right circadian time, we
need darkness.
Summary: our brains are busy while we sleep with cleaning
and maintenance, memory organization, and regulation of other body systems.
There aren’t any sleep shortcuts – we need seven or more hours; infants,
children and teenagers even more.
In our next blog post, we’ll provide some tips on getting a
good night’s sleep.
From our book The Big Brain Place Guide to a Better
Brain, coming this fall.
www.bigbrain.place offers a variety of merchandise to help build better brains.
Comments