How Getting Enough Sleep Helps Your Brain - West Tennessee Healthcare (2025)

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How Getting Enough Sleep Helps Your Brain - West Tennessee Healthcare? ›

Sleep is prime time for your brain to get busy processing memories. As you sleep, your brain works to solidify memories that you formed throughout the day. It also links these new memories to older ones, helping you make connections between different pieces of information to come up with new ideas.

Quality sleep—and getting enough of it at the right times—is as essential to survival as food and water. Without sleep, you can't form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories. Lack of sleep makes it harder to concentrate and respond quickly.

While you're sleeping, your brain is getting ready for the next day. It's forming new pathways to help you learn and remember information. Studies show that a good night's sleep improves learning and problem-solving skills. Sleep also helps you pay attention, make decisions, and be creative.

It can make getting a good night's sleep on a regular basis seem like a dream. But sleep is as important for good health as diet and exercise. Good sleep improves your brain performance, mood, and health. Not getting enough quality sleep regularly raises the risk of many diseases and disorders.

First, a healthy amount of sleep is vital for “brain plasticity,” or the brain's ability to adapt to input. If we sleep too little, we become unable to process what we've learned during the day and we have more trouble remembering it in the future.

Several trends have emerged that link oversleeping with increased rates of mortality and disease. In sum, longer sleep habits have been associated with depression, cognitive impairment, increased pain, inflammation, impact fertility, and increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, stroke, and mortality.

As a result, side sleeping is the best way to sleep for your brain. According to research, the brain's glymphatic system is almost completely dormant during the day and most active while you sleep. While a person sleeps, the canals that form their brain's glymphatic system increase by around 60%.

“Sleep services all aspects of our body in one way or another: molecular, energy balance, as well as intellectual function, alertness and mood,” says Dr. Merrill Mitler, a sleep expert and neuroscientist at NIH. When you're tired, you can't function at your best.

The study's senior author also comments on the findings, saying, “We have identified a new function of deep sleep, one that decreases anxiety overnight by reorganizing connections in the brain.” “Deep sleep seems to be a natural anxiolytic (anxiety inhibitor), so long as we get it each and every night,” concludes Prof.

If you're having problems sleeping, you might: be more likely to feel anxious, depressed or suicidal. be more likely to have psychotic episodes – poor sleep can trigger mania, psychosis or paranoia, or make existing symptoms worse.

What happens if you sleep more than enough? ›

What happens when you oversleep? Short-term oversleeping may cause drowsiness, fatigue, anxiety, and brain fogginess. However, chronic oversleeping has been associated with several health conditions, such as sleep apnea, idiopathic hypersomnia, diabetes, and stroke, among others.

Sleep gives your body time to repair itself and carry out important functions, like clearing out waste and releasing hormones. Without these processes, our bodies can't function correctly. Getting enough sleep is essential for maintaining good health. We need sleep to survive — just like we need food and water.

Sleep helps maintain cognitive skills, such as attention, learning, and memory, such that poor sleep can make it much more difficult to cope with even relatively minor stressors and can even impact our ability to perceive the world accurately.

Sleep has been proven to improve memory recall, regulate metabolism, and reduce mental fatigue. A minimum of 7 hours of daily sleep seems to be necessary for proper cognitive and behavioral function.

And now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that brain waves help flush waste out of the brain during sleep. Individual nerve cells coordinate to produce rhythmic waves that propel fluid through dense brain tissue, washing the tissue in the process.

Research has shown that sleep strengthens the neural connections that form memories. When you are sleep-deprived, those neurons are overworked and no longer function properly, affecting the way you process information and your ability to remember or learn.

Results show that participants with poor sleep quality had shrinkage in one part of their frontal cortex. They also had deterioration in three other parts of the brain that are involved in reasoning, planning, memory and problem-solving. The results were more pronounced in people over 60 years old.

Elementary school-age children who get less than nine hours of sleep per night have significant differences in certain brain regions responsible for memory, intelligence, and well-being compared to those who get the recommended 9-12 hours of sleep per night, according to a new study led by University of Maryland School ...