How Might Sleep Affect Reading and Retaining?
Written by Allen Souksawan 8/22/2021
Ever since most of us were young, we were often reminded to get plenty of sleep and its importance in helping us “grow big and strong”. As we get older, we often neglect our sleep due to work, school, family, etc. However, it still plays a pivotal role in our growth, specifically our ability to learn and memorize information.
“He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities.” - Benjamin Franklin.
How Sleep Impacts Memory
When we sleep, our bodies do not simply stop working. Even though we are no longer physically moving around, the internal mechanisms inside us are working hard to repair and prime us for when we wake up the next day.
This is especially true in regards to our brains. When you sleep your brain sorts through the information you learned or were thinking about in your waking hours.
A Good Night’s Rest Helps Us Retain Information
During the deepest stage of sleep, known as REM sleep, your brain strengthens memories, begins performing maintenance tasks, and starts to clean itself. It is during REM sleep the brain gets rid of the less important parts of what you’ve studied and consolidates, or strengthens the parts you are trying to remember. It does this by going over the neural pathways related to the skill or subject. Essentially, your brain will “rehearse” the more difficult ideas or skills over and over like much like how you would repeat something while awake in order to remember it.
A Clean Brain Learns Better
Your brain makes up two percent of our body composition but uses twenty percent of our body’s total energy. This is why it is often referred to as our most “expensive” organ. And like all of our other organs, when our brains use energy to function it will create waste products. Even by simply being awake our brain creates metabolic waste chemicals that build up over the day. This waste is usually made up of proteins that build up and become toxic.
Your lymphatic system is a system of vessels that pump fluid that washes out waste from our organs. Likewise, your brain has a similar way of cleaning. The cerebrospinal fluid that cushions your brain inside your skull acts as a sort of cleaning liquid for your brain. When you sleep, your brain cells shrink and allow fluid to pass between them to wash away all the waste, which is drained through an opening into the lymphatic system.
Cleaning out this toxic metabolic waste can be compared to rivers connected to a larger body of water, like a lake or sea. By keeping those rivers free of debris that would otherwise block them, water can flow freely in and out. In the case of your cognitive performance, cleaning out the toxins during the night will help you avoid brain fog and help you take in new material as well as think more clearly during activities like tests.
The Dangers of Sleep Deprivation
To hammer in the benefits of how getting enough sleep improves our learning and memory, it is worth going into how inadequate sleep causes a decline in overall cognitive performance and quality of life. While having a couple of nights of less than adequate sleep usually will not hurt you. Not getting enough sleep over a long period of time will make things more difficult. Not many people realize that sleep deprivation accumulates over time and is simply not a one-and-done situation.
First and the most obvious, not getting enough sleep means you won’t have enough energy to go and learn or practice whatever you are trying to improve. Secondly not giving the brain enough time to cleanse itself from all the waste that’s been built up makes it harder to think clearly nor will it have time to consolidate the information you are trying to remember. And lastly, a study done by researchers from the University of Connecticut has found that a sleep-deprived person’s brain waves will shortly change into patterns that resemble brain waves while sleeping. This is what we would call zoning out or drawing a blank.
Sleep deprivation can make your life worse and in some cases make it shorter with its adverse effects. Your mental and bodily health is also dependent on sleep. And going too long with too little sleep can lead to a weakened immune system, headaches, high blood pressure, higher risk of diabetes, weight gain, and increased levels of anxiety and depression.
As someone who has struggled with sleeping problems in the past, I personally support setting up a sleep schedule and a bedtime routine to avoid a lack of sleep and to reap the rewards of a good night’s rest.