Can you remember how great a good night’s sleep makes you feel? Or has it been too long to recall?
It turns out that sleep is good for you in many more ways than we thought.
At the end of a (typically) too-long day when you finally hit the sack, you hope that sleep will renew your strength and energy, but in fact, a good sleep will do much more than just that. Our brains are hard at work making sense of the day’s overflow of information and creating memories. It is also completing crucial tasks for its own health, in effect, doing maintenance.
Sleep has become a luxury for many people. Getting too little sleep has become so common that we dismiss feeling drowsy all day as an annoying but harmless consequence. It has even become a badge of honour to get little of it: “Me? I can get by on only four hours a night!” Unfortunately, a brain that does not get a nightly break of seven to nine hours robs us of many abilities and skills.
Like all organs in the body, the brain consumes energy and spits out waste. The waste from the other organs is broken down and funnelled into the lymph system, but the brain is different. Its waste is handled by previously-ignored glial cells.
As neurons fire all day to keep the brain alert, they also send out free radicals as a by-product. The concern is that free radicals can react with parts of the body’s cells and cause them to die; antioxidants are the body’s tool for preventing damage to the body. During sleep, antioxidants are generated in the brain to combat the free radicals.
While the body sleeps, glial cells turn into a giant pump. First, they slow the brain’s activity to a third of its maximum frequency. Cells in the brain actually shrink during sleep, making more room for brain and spinal cord fluid to flow back and forth, flushing the brain, as it were.
Why does this matter? Because not getting enough sleep may lead to glial cells that are unable to clear out all of the detritus from the brain. And the implication of this build up is believed to being more prone to Alzheimer’s — caused by a building up of amyloid protein that was not cleared effectively.
It is during sleep that the brain can perform its maintenance. In other words, not enough sleep, not enough maintenance; and that has serious implications for health. There is a price to pay for not getting enough sleep, one that cannot be made up simply by sleeping more on the weekend. It may help to do so, but you cannot make up the missed sleep entirely.
Getting the required amount of sleep improves concentration, sharpens planning and memory skills and even maintains the fat-burning systems that regulate our weight. If we all got the right amount of sleep, we would all be less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes and be better equipped to battle depression and anxiety. We might even reduce our chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis and cancer.
