How You Can Permanently Damage Your Brain If You Keep Putting Off Sleep. June 24, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Do without sleep now and make up for it later. It's a pretty common sleep strategy for adults with busy lives and demanding schedules that crowd out sufficient time for sleep on a daily basis. New research suggests that the consequences of chronic insufficient sleep are less reversible than previously understood and may involve lasting damage to the brain. Scientists put mice on a rotating sleep routine, including periods of normal rest, short periods of wakefulness and also extended periods without sleep.
. • Short-term sleep loss in mice elicited a protective response from LC neurons. . • Short-term sleep loss also spurred antioxidant activity in LC neurons, another protection against cell damage and stress. • Under periods of prolonged sleep loss, LC neurons lost the ability to generate these protective responses. Sleep and the Teenage Brain. By Maria Popova How a seemingly simple change can have a profound effect on everything from academic performance to bullying. “Sleep is the greatest creative aphrodisiac,” Debbie Millman asserted in her advice on breaking through your creative block. “Sleep deprivation will profoundly affect your creativity, your productivity, and your decision-making,” Arianna Huffington cautioned graduating seniors in her Smith College commencement address on redefining success.
And yet, as German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg argued in his fantastic Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired — one of the best science books of 2012, and undoubtedly among the best you’ll ever read — teenagers have already endured years of institutionally inflicted sleep deprivation by the time they get to college: there is a tragic disconnect between teens’ circadian givens and our social expectations of them, encapsulated in what is known as the disco hypothesis. Donating = Loving. Internal Time: The Science of Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired. By Maria Popova Debunking the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens’ risk for smoking. “Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.)
This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired, a fine addition to these 7 essential books on time, German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg demonstrates through a wealth of research that our sleep patterns have little to do with laziness and other such scorned character flaws, and everything to do with biology.
(Thanks, Jalees.) This Is What Happens When You Don't Get Enough Sleep (Infographic) You know what it feels like when you don't get enough sleep. You're grumpy, you're groggy, and you probably just don't really feel like yourself. But did you know that sleep deprivation can have serious long-term consequences on your body and mind? Fortunately, the folks over at the Huffington Post have put together an infographic that details what some of those effects may be. Long story short: get enough high-quality sleep if you want to be your best self! But all you loyal MindBodyGreen readers already knew that, didn't you? 8 Tips To Help You Live To Be 100 In my last article, I gave you the labs you should run to know how quickly or how slowly your body is aging. Time Your Power Nap Naturally with Einstein and Dali's Key Method.