9 Groundbreaking Discoveries About Sleep

 

Despite sleep’s critical role in our lives, there’s a lot about this behavior we don’t understand, especially what happens when we can’t get enough. However, we are making some progress in our research — the team at SciShow has compiled a list of some of the most important recent discoveries we’ve made about sleep.

A total lack of sleep can kill you, however, even a little sleep deprivation can have serious consequences. For example, according to the SciShow video, lack of sleep can cause wounds to heal much slower than normal and put your immune system into overdrive, making you less able to fight off possible inflammations.

Read: One Night Of Poor Sleep Takes a Toll On Your Heart

Lack of sleep not only makes you sicker, it could make you more sensitive to pain. Research has shown that rats purposely deprived of sleep were more sensitive to the pain caused by electrical shocks, and humans with self-reported insomnia also reported having more muscle aches and general pain than those without this sleep disorder, SciShow reported.

Sleep isn’t just important for your physical health, it also plays a vita role in your mental health. For example, it’s during sleep that we consolidate memories related to facts and learning. Getting enough sleep can actually improve your memory. This suggests that pulling an all-nighter before a big test may actually be counter-productive.

Recently, researchers learned that our brains actually “self-clean” while we sleep, flushing out toxins that can build up throughout the day. Although this is a fairly recent discovery, this could be yet another critically important role for sleep considering that diseases such as Alzheimer’s are related to to the buildup of toxins in the brain.