What’s something that’s good for you, you do every day (hopefully), and that you’re still not doing enough? Washing your hands, probably, you sicko.
But sleep is important, too. So let’s talk about it. Or let’s let Dr. Sigrid Veasey talk about it, since she’s a doctor at Penn’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology. Her 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.
Because, in addition to all of its wonderful supercomputer abilities, your brain is also kind of like a trash can.
That's not very nice. And, um, what?
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). Scientists believe that part of sleep’s function is to allow your body time to clear them out of your dome. So depriving yourself of sleep is a bit like looking at your kitchen’s overflowing trash, and being like, Nah, it’s cool. Except instead of a trashcan, it’s your brain.
Okay, yeah, but you can just take that trash out at a later date, as in: make up for lack of sleep during the workweek by sleeping through the weekend.
Ah, but not so fast. 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 [the subjects] a full a 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.”
So, intrigued, she conducted a study on mice—"to be able to look at the brain we have to look at mouse models"—to try to figure out why. The results? Those mice lost some of the neurons that are important for paying attention.
“What we think is that the reason that there is this cumulative effect now is that you're probably building up toxic proteins in your brain," explains Dr. Veasey. "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. But if you did it night after night after night, you can stack up those toxic proteins and then they can actually aggregate. And once they aggregate, you might never be able to get rid of them.”
That sounds...not good.
It's not. “So what you would be doing, in essence, is just slowly aging. You know how your brain is normally aging over 80 or 90 years, depending upon how long you live? Maybe it's just gonna age a little bit faster. So 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. Which would be a bummer.”
But it is worth remembering that these are the results of tests in mice, not humans, so this is still a guess at this point. Regardless, it seems more and more unequivocal that if "you tax the system, you're going to pay."
But I’ve got this friend Margaret Thatcher and she swears she only needs four or five hours of sleep, and she’s good.
Yes, we all know a Margaret or six. And while it's true that how much sleep you need is subjective, the problem is that Margaret isn't really a good judge of whether or not she's operating at optimal neural function. After adjusting to a life of sleep deprivation, she may underestimate her impairment since that deprived state has become her new cognitive normal.