The less you sleep, the older your brain gets
Many things have been said about bad sleep, and even worse about not sleeping. Well, the following post won’t make a difference, on the contrary, it invites you to try to correct it immediately if you suffer from this evil. Sleeping well plays a very important role in our life both for physical and mental health. And on the contrary, not doing so can age your brain.
Don’t let your brain get old
We know that the aging process is normal, it is a biological issue, at some point it must occur. But are you in too much of a hurry for this to happen to you now? We imagine that your answer is NO. So, what are you doing awake? Go to sleep and continue reading this tomorrow.
You’re back? Or was it too early for you to go to rest? Perfect, then let’s continue. For a long time, it’s been said how important sleep is. It’s even said that we should sleep a minimum of 7 hours a day. The maximum should be 9 hours, so if you could sleep 8 hours every night, you would certainly be in the perfect range.
Unlike today’s smart phones, we don’t use a fast-charging charger, which means our battery requires 7-9 hours to fully recharge and is in optimal condition for the next day.
Of course, it can happen that if we are young, we often fall asleep because we feel that our body can hold on without a problem. This is true, but the point is that sooner or later, the body will take its toll.
It’s like our brain that ages faster when you don’t let it get enough sleep. That’s what a study by Duke-NUS researchers revealed. These scientists sought to study the enlargement of the brain ventricle more closely. This ventricular enlargement is a marker that measures cognitive decline and the development of various neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.
The study was going very well, until they noticed something that had never been done before which was to use this meter to check the effect of sleep on the brain. The study involving 66 Chinese volunteers showed that those who had slept less than the established hours had a greater enlargement of the brain ventricle than those who had slept much more.
“Our results link short sleep as a marker of brain aging,” said Dr. June Lo, lead author of the research.
But obviously this is not all, and is that lack of sleep is related to a delay in puberty, prevents us from being able to repair sectors of our memory that is only repaired during sleep. And of course, a night without good sleep means a day with very low spirits.
Even you could claim to have slept 8 or 9 hours and still, if those hours were frustrated by outside noises, nightmares, or by getting up several times during the night, you might not have slept well.
But don’t push yourself on this, because those who do get much worse. You need to sleep, that’s true, but try your best without stressing to achieve it, if you see that it is impossible, seek help, remember that sleeping well will allow you to have a more vigorous, energetic and young brain for a long time.