The quality and quantity of hours of sleep is a fundamental ingredient for physical and mental health There is various research that supports the harmful consequences of getting little rest, both emotionally and cognitively. It can be said that little sleep worsens people’s quality of life since it interferes with social, romantic, work and academic relationships.
It is important to clarify that lack of sleep, in the vast majority of times, is a consequence rather than a pathology in and of itself. Stress, all the worries of daily life and physical pain lead to insomnia due to the state of alert in which the body is. Poor sleep can also be a symptom of depression or anxiety. There may be several causes, but what all the studies do conclude is that it significantly affects the functioning of our brain.
As we have mentioned, lack of sleep affects various areas of a person’s life. However, the aspect that has been studied the most is learning and memory. The results are unequivocal: The less and worse you sleep, the less the brain’s ability to form and retain learning and memories Therefore, in today’s article, we will focus on the effects of a few hours of rest on cognitive performance. Stay to discover what happens in your brain when you suffer from insomnia and some recommendations to try to alleviate the situation.
If you have gone through a time where sleeping more than 3 or 4 hours seemed like an unattainable luxury, you will have realized the importance of resting well to feel better both physically and mentally. When we sleep poorly and little, day-to-day life becomes heavier, everything costs three times as much, we are moody, clumsy, it is difficult for us to concentrate and we can even detect a lack of memory.
In this regard, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports revealed that Restricting sleep to 4 hours in a single night makes it difficult to acquire new memories the next day What’s more, halving your night’s sleep time, even for just one night, negatively affects the formation of new memories. This occurs because during the REM phase of sleep, the brain processes the information captured during the day and helps to consolidate and store it properly. If you do not sleep and therefore do not reach this phase, that is when the gaps begin in the brain. Fortunately, these authors discovered that sleeping between 7 and 8 hours could reverse these effects and recover the weakest memories.
There is an interesting study where they separated the participants into two groups. One of the groups was able to rest adequately and on the contrary, the other group stayed awake all night. The next day, they had to perform a series of tasks related to memory and curiously, it was discovered that when performing one of the tasks, more specifically, when memorizing a group of images, the sleep-deprived participants showed less activity in the hippocampus compared to participants who had rested. This shows that the lack of a single night of sleep creates a deficiency in the hippocampus and therefore, it is not surprising that it is difficult to store new memories.
Since we are analyzing the relationship between memory and lack of sleep, It is interesting to mention the research carried out on the consequences of little rest and Alzheimer’s We talked about a study where 100 people participated and with the aim of measuring the quantity and quality of sleep of the participants, the researchers placed a device on the individuals and, in turn, asked them to write a sleep diary and answer questionnaires. The results are alarming. After two weeks of study, they discovered that those people who had woken up five or more times an hour during the night were more likely to have amyloid plaques than those who had slept continuously.
To understand it, amyloid plaques are the result of the accumulation of a protein characteristic of people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease that basically prevents a correct connection between neurons and, consequently, gradually causes their degeneration. However, researchers cannot say exactly whether lack of sleep leads to the formation of amyloid plaques or vice versa; longitudinal studies are needed to do so.
The importance of good rest to improve memory is portrayed. Thus, Therapeutic interventions that restore sleep are beginning to be used in order to offer preventive benefits to reduce the risk of cognitive decline both in healthy people and those affected by a neurodegenerative disease.
Many times, these therapeutic interventions require medication to rebalance sleep cycles. Most of the time it is difficult to achieve it naturally, therefore, the best strategy is to start with a dose of medication and once the brain learns to sleep, gradually reduce it.
Recommendations to combat lack of sleep
To regain your sleep routine and improve cognitive performance and mood, there are certain suggestions that can be followed. Here are some simple guidelines:
