Why is sleep important?
Sleep is important because, without it, our cognitive functionality including memory, decision-making, and creativity would suffer. After 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. As such, eight hours of sleep after 16 hours of wakefulness tends to be the golden formula for having both a productive day and a restorative night. While we sleep, our body engages in many functions vital to our overall health and well-being.
Sleeping activates systems in the body that support physical and emotional health. These systems include the glymphatic system. This system works during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep to clear out metabolic toxins such as beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease, that builds up in the brain throughout our waking hours. Sleep's promotion of the immune system also allows cancer-fighting immune cells to work. One night of four hours of sleep will drop these cells by 70%.
The body releases growth hormones during deep sleep stages and carries out tissue, muscle, and bone repair. Sleep also helps regulate glucose metabolism, hormone release, and memory.
Sleep is essential for the process of learning. While we sleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory and strengthen memories by connecting new memories together and linking them with pre-existing ones.
During sleep, the emotional circuits of the brain are also modified. Connections between the amygdala, the emotion centre of the brain, and the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functioning, are strengthened when we sleep. When we are sleep deprived, this connection is weakened, causing our emotional processing to be dysregulated.
Lack of sleep can be detrimental to one's health and well-being. Sleeplessness leads to a depletion of resources including energy, coping skills, and problem-solving abilities. Sleep deprivation is a major predictor of all-cause mortality including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide. People who get inadequate sleep are more likely to: