The list of sleep induced maladies is a long’ne.
There’s the autopilot eating. The temper benders. The spontaneously not knowing how to English.
Or body.
Or car.
Yes, these’re immediate ramifications awaiting too many nights of non-sleepery. And it’s so easy to fall prey to it. You’re busy. You’ve got a million to do’s to do by day. And by night, they’re still reverberating in your cranium. Once you’re finally in bed, the gears are still going full throttle and an orchestra of fragmented facets of the day resonates loudly. Pieces of an earlier conversation. Tomorrow’s errands. An unpaid bill. And, right around the time you finally enter delta wave heaven, that blasted alarm’s jarring you awake again. What you may know is that if you let those restless nights turn into weeks, then the likes of diabetes and obesity may await you. What you may not know, however, is that according to newer findings – it could also lead to more serious probs later on down the road.
The road, that is, which you’re wandering lost on in the middle of the night.
Sans your pants.
Because… dementia.
Indeed, some recent research – still in the early stages – is observing a possible link between Alzheimer’s patients and peeps who don’t get enough deep sleep. See, deep sleep’s a specific stage in our 90 minute slumber cycle. And the reason it’s such a BFD? Because that’s when all the crucial recovery ensues in our cogitation organ. It’s like it’s doing damage control for all the shiz we’ve been putting it through by day. But along with the memory filing and miscellaneous housekeeping, another vital antivirus program’s running on our cerebral supercomputer: the one that prevents Alzheimer’s.
How?
Well, with Alzheimer’s you get these things (called sticky amyloid plaques) that build up between your nerve cells. That’s bad because the area between nerves is basically their Wi-fi signal. It’s how they chat. Plaques shut down that connection, the filthy talk-blockers. And since functional, communicating nerves’re responsible for what makes you different from a babbling stalk of broccoli, that’s no bueno. So, science tried to find out why that’s happening. And when they did studies on sleep deprived mice, they noticed these plaques were significantly more pronounced in the restless rodents. (Though, you’ve gotta wonder what they did to keep the mice up so late.)
“Can I get another slice of speed brie, please? I appear to be coming down.”
Then, they did this other study about three years ago. (Or, specifically 2013, if you’re nostalgically reading this from the future when you have a terminal case of forgotfulness and are fondly recalling the days when computers were something external and separate from our skulls.) And in that study, they learned why plaques and bad sleeping happen tandem to eachother. See, normally, during the intense section of your siesta cycle, this amazing cleanup transpires. According to the dude, Iliff, who ran the study, “the fluid that’s normally on the outside of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid — it’s a clean, clear fluid — it actually begins to recirculate back into and through the brain along the outsides of blood vessels.” And who cares about what your disgusting body juices are doing when you’re zonked out? You, hopefully. ’cause that process (which happens through this thing called the glymphatic system) lets that wad of thought meat in your body’s attic expel a lotta toxins… including the ones that induce all’a that aforementioned plaquery.
While science is still on the verge of proving this link between docking deep sleep and catching a case’ve Alzheimer’s (because: correlation’s not causation), there does seem to be a fascinating connection thus far. So what’s the takeaway? To err on the side of caution, obvi. Regardless of whether they prove this theory, deep sleep’s a much needed cleanup time. And, aside from the short term side effects you obviously won’t hafta suffer, there’s also potentially this whole dementia prevention system going on as it jettisons other junk from you too, too. And if there’s even a “maybe” chance of spending my golden years giving myself golden showers all day long (’cause in reality it’s less like “The Notebook” and more like “The Visit”), then I’d rather take the best measure possible. Which everyone tells you to do anyway. Get to bed early, and get enough hours in. Which we didn’t need our lab mice friends to tell us.
So, loves, don’t “forget” to get a punctual slumber tonight.
Followed by a long, quality sleep.
Future-you (without a goldfish memory and who’s not eating bleach) will thank now-you.