#I NEED TO GO TO SLEEP NOW FULL#

If you constantly have trouble sleeping, climbing into bed can become a nagging reminder of all those previous nights of worry, which inspires a hardened resolve, along the lines of “I better fall asleep tonight.” Conditioning yourself to have anxiety about anxiety. So, the very first time that they actually have time to think about things like paying bills, forgot to call so-and-so, blah blah blah, is when they’re lying in bed.”ģ. Anxiety: “People basically are working all day long, getting rid of whatever you have to get done. The time on the clock may indicate it’s time to go to bed, but your body listens to its own clock.Ģ. If your Circadian rhythm doesn’t line up with society’s “normal” sleeping hours. There’s a chance they’re additive, meaning those toxic proteins just add on top of each other.ĭr Veasey brings up three leading causes of such late-night restlessness:ġ. If that person sleeps seven hours on vacation a night and feels awesome and starts thinking, ‘Man, I wanna do this, I wanna do this’, and starts to really be vibrant, much more vibrant, not just getting by actually thriving, then, in that circumstance, they start to really realise that they clearly needed that extra sleep.”Ĭomplicating this lack of study even further is the uncertainty of what happens when you combine different activities that can negatively impact the brain – so sleep loss tag-teaming the brain with heavy drinking or boxing or a consistently bad appetite. If that person can only sleep four hours a night on vacation and feels exactly the same on vacation as at home, then that person probably only needs four hours. How can you know if you’re one of these people who’s underestimating their own impairment?ĭr Veasey suggests everyone “go on vacation” – uh, okay! – “ sleep as much as you can possibly sleep. “And on the third night, while even though their performance is getting worse, they actually say, ‘I’m not so bad.’ And by the seventh night they say, ‘This isn’t so bad after all.’ And yet their performance all across those seven days is getting worse, worse, worse, worse.”

“Put someone on the schedule of three hours a night for seven nights, the first two nights are like, ‘Oh my god, I feel really tired,’” says Dr Veasey. Regardless, it seems more and more unequivocal that if “you tax the system, you’re going to pay.” So what you would be doing, in essence, is just slowly ageing… It would be like an 80-year-old brain in a 60-year-old, or a 60-year-old brain in a 40-year-old.”īut it is worth remembering that these are the results of tests in mice, not humans, so this is still a guess at this point. And once they aggregate, you might never be able to get rid of them. But if you did it night after night after night, you can stack up those toxic proteins and then they can actually aggregate. So, if you pulled an all-nighter, and then you slept really well for the next six nights, you’re probably getting enough time to get the toxic proteins broken down and cleared out of the brain.

#I NEED TO GO TO SLEEP NOW FULL#

Dr Veasey says that after a week of depriving humans of sleep in order to study the effects of sleep deprivation on brain function, “if you give a full weekend’s worth of recovery – a Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, three days of getting nine hours’ time in bed – then you repeat the function again, they actually haven’t come back to normal. Okay, yeah, but you can just take that trash out at a later date, as in: make up for lack of sleep during the work week by sleeping through the weekend.Īh, but not so fast. Except instead of a trash can, it’s your brain. So, depriving yourself of sleep is a bit like looking at your kitchen’s overflowing trash, and being like, Nah, it’s cool. Scientists believe that part of sleep’s function is to allow your body time to clear them out of your dome. Here’s the downside of using your brain: In the process of carrying the electrical signals that are sent throughout your body to make it, you know, do things, neurons make toxic proteins (like amyloid and tau, associated with CTE and Alzheimer’s). Because, in addition to all of its wonderful supercomputer abilities, your brain is also kind of like a trash can. We chatted with Dr Sigrid Veasey, a doctor at Penn’s Center for Sleep & Circadian Neurobiology, whose studies have gone beyond what you likely already know – that you’re not sleeping enough and that it’s bad for you – and unearthed some deeper, though perhaps more anxiety-inducing, revelations about why the effects of chronic sleep loss create a deficit you might never overcome. Sleep is important – to, well, function – but also for rest and recovery when you’re trying to achieve your health goals.

I need to go to sleep now