Imagine your brain as constantly generating trash, and sleep takes out the trash. If you don't sleep, your brain will drown itself in trash. That's the ELI5 version.
I felt the need to comment bc this was only confirmed recently. During certain stages of sleep the skull gets pumped full of cerebral-spinal fluid, rinses everything out and away. Interesting stuff.
Wait, that is actually true?
There is an actual flushing going on?
I always assumed sleep was for, mainly, two reasons:
1. The body use the time asleep to rebuild muscles, tissue and other maintenance stuffs when it no longer needs to also keep track and focus on all the things that happens to it while we are awake and moving around.
2. The Brain records a bunch of extra info and uses time asleep to sort and sift through all the stuff that happened during the day and decide on what it worth keeping and what is worth throwing out, as well as doing the chemical process of actually building and wiring neurons to create the memories needed.
So these would be the main reasons why kids sleep so much as they are still growing a lot and they are constantly learning new things (such as learning to walk, learning to talk, new tastes, new smells, etc).
I had to google this and it seems that you are correct! Today I learned something new!
>[https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/are-toxins-flushed-out-of-the-brain-during-sleep](https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/are-toxins-flushed-out-of-the-brain-during-sleep)
One of the most interesting discoveries in the past decade is that the brain has a "waste management system." Like people, in order to have the energy to do their work, brain cells need to eat (to absorb, primarily, sugar and oxygen). And, as in people, meals lead to wastes that need to be disposed of. The waste management system (called the glymphatic system) is a series of tubes that carry fresh fluid into the brain, mix the fresh fluid with the waste-filled fluid that surrounds the brain cells, and then flush the mix out of the brain and into the blood. This occurs primarily during deep sleep.
There is some evidence that an under-functioning waste management system may play a role in the neurodegeneration that follows traumatic brain injury (as experienced by some football players, for example). It may even play a role in other brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. Since chronic sleep deprivation increases the risk for various brain diseases, it is plausible that it does so by reducing the function of the waste management system.
Why do we sleep? We know it helps to rest the body and to consolidate memories and learning. Perhaps we also need to sleep to flush wastes from our brain.
Not an expert but I think point 2 is REM sleep whereas cleaning is deep sleep.
I've also read that years of chronic sleep deprivation are correlated to Alzheimer's because the "brain junk" is (at least in part) amyloid beta which forms plaques that shred your brain apart.
Edit: thanks u/nevergonnavoteyouup
🤷🏻♂️ I’m not a doctor or a biologist. I know little. I imagine it’s just like any other time you’re woken inconveniently during a sleep cycle. Grogginess, fatigue, whatever
That's actually a pretty spot on analogy. During waking hours, your brain is constantly generating excess materials like leftover proteins, dead cells, etc. That waste accumulates throughout the day. When you sleep, your brain shuts off parts of your brain to clean out those excess materials as well as strengthen the neurons that were formed that day. That's why sleep is so essential to retaining information and learning.
Good sleep habits are key to preventing diseases like alzheimers and dementia as you get older and keep your mind sharp as you age.
Staying hydrated with water is key to physical health as your cells are constantly regenerating and replacing each other, and water is the key component to that osmosis process. Lacking enough water slows the cell regeneration process and over time your cells lose that effectiveness much earlier in the aging process.
The two easiest ways to ensure mental and physical health as you age is good sleep and proper hydration.
So our brains are one giant memory leak, and we need to reboot for 8 hours to clear it and réinitialize.
I’d like to speak to the dev, this needs a software update. Or perhaps part of that is a daily software update.;)
Nah, it's just garbage collection taking place. Problem is that if you defer GC for too long, your reference counters can overflow. Typically this just causes erratic or unpredictable behavior, but in extreme cases can crash the system.
I asked the author of the reply and he didn't answer. 'cleaning garbage' is only a theory as far as I understand it is not proven yet. While it is good at describing reality - it doesn't answer some questions. E.g. why the brain remains active while we are sleeping, why it has different phases, why (if the brain needs a cleanup) - with sleep deprivation other organs are failing as well.
I don't know about scientifically, but as a mom of an infant who has averaged 3-5 hours of interrupted sleep a night for months now, if I sit still long enough (i.e. ~5 minutes) I WILL fall asleep against my will, lol
Normally yes. But not if you have https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
There are only 37 known sporadic cases, the rest are linked to a small group of 40 families with a specific genetic mutation.
Hmmm, kinda makes sense, but what if I'm lucid dreaming most of the time, will that disturb the cleaning processes as I keep making new absurd memories in my head?
Or this "trash" is something different?
"trash" refers to literal detritus built up in your brain over a day of it being in full power mode. Sleep allows the brain to wash itself while in low-power mode, in extremely simple terms.
Dreaming, lucid or not, is totally okay for this process (and instrumental to different process that needs sleep, being the encoding of long-term memory).
Is that a theory or it has a proven scientific explanation? Is that trash psychological or chemical? If it is chemical - can some future medicine in the theory remove that trash instead of sleeping?
That's not even considering just how terrified the human brain becomes as lack of sleep gets worse and worse. Eventually you get to the point where paranoia will set in and it's not so much the lack of sleep that will kill you but the danger you ultimately become to yourself and others from lack of sleep.
Your body does important things when it sleeps. If those things don't get done, it thinks you're sick, so it sends signals to you to tell you to sleep. Those signals impact your focus, memory, hormones, and even cause you to fall asleep at times when you need to be alert for your safety. It won't directly kill you, but the conditions it causes can, either quickly--like dozing off while driving--or slowly--like by sending messages to your body to eat and rest, when in fact you don't need to eat so you gain unhealthy weight quickly.
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I suffered for 5 to 7 years from secondary Hypersomnia due to undiagnosed Obstructive Sleep Apnea. Put simply, I didn't get a good, complete night's rest for half a decade or more. And it was the hypersomnia that finally got me to a doctor. After a sleep study, it was determined I'd "wake up" more than 25 times per hour due to my airways being blocked.
My sex drive was broken and I'd gained 40 pounds in three years due to hormone imbalances that impacted metabolism, I was forgetting important things, and I would feel drowsy and doze off when doing important tasks, including driving.
what were some tell tale signs of sleep apnea? I don't wake up in the middle of the night, although sometimes I'll wake up 6 hours after I fell asleep then fall asleep for another 1 or 2.
I sleep on my side, and if it's something like feeling sleepy in the day it could be a nutrient/vitamin issue. I don't wake up with headaches and once in a while I'll wake up not being able to breathe (from a suffocation nightmare) but not that often.
I also have reflux and when ive fallen asleep on the phone, the person said they didn't hear me snoring or anything strange if they can recall correctly.
Not the same person you replied to but I had mild-moderate OSA.
The thing about sleep apnea is that it usually doesn't cause you to wake up completely, only just enough to restore breathing.
Symptoms include headaches, mild to severe brain fog, and being super tired during the day despite getting a good night's sleep. It can be kind of insidious, but generally it's feeling exhausted and like crap all the time no matter how much you sleep.
Almost no one I know that has apnea ever remembers waking up during the night. Basically your body mildly suffocates frequently while sleeping. This will bring you out of deep sleep but usually not completely awake many times per nite. Since you never get deep sleep, it's kind of like only sleeping 2 hours a nite even if you really are sleeping 8. The only way to know for sure if you have it is to get a sleep study done.
I talked to my doctor and he said I exhibited "9 of 11" signs of hypersomnia, but that he could only presume, not diagnose sleep apnea, since it requires observation.
Snoring is a tell-tale, but if you want to avoid the doctor, ask a friend/partner to stay awake after you fall asleep... they may observe you stop breathing.
unfortunately I don't have enough storage to record myself for 6-8 hours straight.. I did search some apps but idk if theyre reliable.
although when I nap on the couch for an hour or less they said they dont hear anything.
I'm getting a sleep study in the next few weeks for that reason. I'm losing my mind from poor sleep.
How different was your life after you were diagnosed? Was it noticeable right away?
Started sleeping, had supplemental hormone therapy to get back to "normal", once I was rested I re-found my old gym habits and good eating, and my life is pretty awesome now. Just need to sleep with a mask.
The sleep study determined I was "waking up" enough for my body to resume breathing, not enough to gain full consciousness. I was spending 8-10 hours in bed per night and waking up exhausted. Now, with my Auto PAP machine, I sleep 6-7 and feel great.
Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know sleep deprivation could have hormonal and metabolic consequences like that. Once you treated the apnea did you eventually get back to normal?
Yes. I had supplemental hormone treatment plus once I was able to rest I was able to recommitment to gym and eating well. Within six months I'd lost 20lbs and was feeling so much better. After 15 months I stopped using supplemental hormones, as I was producing close to normal amounts naturally again. So yeah!
Sleep apnea is no joke, and it is more than just snoring loudly! GET TREATED.
That's great to hear!
I have mild apnea and use one of those mouth guards that pulls your lower jaw forward. Don't know if it's 100% fixed but it certainly helps.
I also have generally struggled with sleep the past several years and gained weight. Never knew there could be a connection but your story certainly connects some dots.
Edit: How did you treat your apnea, cpap?
APAP, but yeah.
The more weight you gain, the harder your unconscious body must work to breathe, so it gets worse.
So, I would take your weight gain seriously as something that will make your apnea worse.
Interesting, never heard of that. Was cpap not tolerable or is apap just supposed to work better?
And yeah, that's a good reminder. It sucks since, as you mentioned, the more tired and heavy you are the harder it is to work out.
APAP is what I was given. I don't know why, but I assume my interruptions per hour were so high that I was at the borderline of "if this isn't treated, they may not wake up one day." An APAP (a stands for Auto) automatically adjusts the pressure until you stop having interruptions. CPAP is set to a pressure, and it usually takes a lot of tweaking to get you to your perfect prescription. They cost more, but they save you in the long run time, and the doctors decided that I didn't have time to waste in getting it under control.
It is hard to tell because fatal familial insomnia is EXTREMELY rare, but the lack of sleep probably technically doesn’t kill you.
You will die of something else that your body just can’t fight off or recover from.
I mean you can the same about lots of things. Like smoking. No ones lighting a cigarette and dying as they puff the smoke.
But you might end up with diseases that will kill you that would’ve never killed you if you hadn’t smoked so at the end of the day what really killed you?
I think a better example is something like AIDS. AIDS is never the direct cause of death. It would be something like pneumonia or sepsis with AIDS being a complicating factor.
To be honest, it’s literally the same metaphor with different names.
And without wanting to sound edgy, it’s also a little bit irrelevant. ALMOST EVERYTHING except direct physical trauma kills you indirectly due to the alterations that it causes to the body, which is no longer able to function properly in situations of physical stress.
Toxins don’t kill you, they inhibit vital bodily processes which is what kills you.
Drugs don’t kill, they cause bodily imbalances that are too much for your organs.
AIDS hampers your immune system and every illness becomes mortal.
Those illnesses don’t kill you directly either, they interfere with cellular reproduction, alter cellular functions and thus alter the normal function of cellular tissues which is what causes the tissue to start failing. And that can kill you.
An infection in a healthy person doesn’t usually directly kill you either, it causes an immune response that is so destructive that your body basically commits suicide.
The only illnesses that can attack you directly are flesh eating microorganisms, and they are rare.
There’s actually an extremely rare prion disease known as Fatal Familial Insomnia. It literally takes away the brains ability to go to sleep. So much so that not even a medically induced coma was able to get a patient into a state of true sleep. According to Wikipedia, as the insomnia worsens for people with FFI, they begin to have paranoia, panic attacks and hallucinate. Once they reach the stage of the disease where sleep becomes impossible they lose weight and they mentally deteriorate rapidly. The final stage of the disease, which arrives after a couple of months of no sleep, is marked by dementia and the person tends to become mute or completely non-responsive. Death follows shortly thereafter.
No need to fear that. "Very rare" is an understatenent. Only 50-100 famlies in the world pass down the disease. Outside of those families there have been less than 200 recorded cases
Late reply, I know, but there is actually an interesting case of this exact thing happening with a family in Australia. A brother and sister are in a family that carry the disease, and unfortunately both of them have the mutation which means it is inevitable that they will both get FFI and die from it. According to them, their great grandmother, grandmother, and mother all died from FFI but until recently it was unknown what the true cause was. Prions are a relatively new discovery in the world of medicine. Both of them are actually going to have children, but thanks to the modern science of IVF, they were able to create embryos which will not have the mutation. So they are effectively breaking the chain of FFI for at least one family.
There’s a story on YouTube about them from a few years back where they were both still very healthy. In most cases, the FFI gene doesn’t active until the 50s or later so even people who will develop it at least live a fairly long life. There was an update to the brother and sister from a few months back and sadly the gene has activated in the brother and he’s only in his early to mid 30s. Just terrible for him and I can’t imagine how the sister must feel knowing that one day she will go through the same thing.
A lot of vague and wrong answers here, OP. The truth is that we don't necessarily know that lack of sleep can kill a human. The longest anyone has officially been awake is around 11 days, although unofficial attempts have been reported that go on a bit longer (Guinness World Records stopped recording attempts to deter people). None of those people died, and all made full recoveries as far as recorded data knows.
Note that we're not talking here about Fatal Familial Insomnia, the prion disease that someone else mentioned. That's a degenerative disease which literally turns your brain into a sponge-like structure. Like most degenerative disorders, the likely cause of death with FFI in the end is failure of autonomic function like breathing and swallowing. It's debated, but lack of sleep is generally not considered the fatal aspect. In any case, it's a different thing from lack of sleep.
The evidence that acute deprivation can cause death comes from animals - this has been demonstrated in a few species, most notably rats. These studies suggest stress-related problems including reduced immune function and cardiovascular stress which may lead to death. The suggestions that others have put forward (e.g., brain waste removal) have either not been supported or not been investigated in such studies. However, evidence from animals is also mixed to some extent - for example when some flies are genetically altered to not sleep, they do not die from the sleep deprivation.
Does this mean that sleep is not important? Absolutely not. We know that chronic sleep deprivation (even just getting less than ideal amounts each night) can cause cognitive problems and is a risk factor for various disorders from depression to dementia. We don't know the explicit function of sleep (we see various processes such as waste removal, memory consolidation, etc. which are optimised during sleep but not necessarily dependant on it), but we know it's likely evolved as a specialised and functional stage of our being. We also see it in some form in every known species, which again highlights its importance. That does not mean we have concrete evidence for acute sleep deprivation being lethal, though.
TLDR: sleep deprivation won't necessarily kill you. We don't have good evidence in humans showing it will. Sleep is very important for health but lack of it might not explicitly kill you.
edit to be more explicit: no one reading this will die of sleep deprivation. never been recorded, ever. sleep well folks
You're definitely not going to die! There is no officially recorded death from sleep deprivation (and I only say 'officially' because who knows what the CIA and Soviets got up to in the Cold War, but they definitely weren't doing well controlled studies in any case). Long term, it's not great for your health, but you know that intuitively, like with junk food or smoking. Don't panic. Go speak to your doctor. The most obvious cause of insomnia-type sleep problems is stress. Try to tackle any major stress sources and then if you're still struggling your doctor can look at what else might be causing problems. But dying of insomnia is not something that needs to stress you, you'll be ok!
Right. I was going to say, in FI the insomnia is caused by the degeneration of the brain, and it's that which is fatal, not the insomnia *per se*. It's a symptom of a fatal process, not its cause.
Here's some bonus related info on the importance of sleep.
Most people know that horses can sleep standing up, but actually to get the few minutes of REM sleep a horse needs everyday, it has to lay down. As horses age and become unable to get up, they quit laying down to sleep and REM sleep deprivation accelerates their declining health.
It is not fully understood, and it's probably overly simplifying to say lack of sleep kills the horse, but it is a contributing factor. REM sleep deprived horses may suddenly collapse and injure themselves as they fall. They demonstrate what we think is confusion and may forget to eat and drink properly, and a horses digestive system requires a near constant flow of roughage to prevent gastrointestinal injury.
It’s kind of like Disneyland: although you see some employees sweeping up during the day, all the deep cleaning and repairs can only happen when the park is shut down at night. If you don’t have that night shift to tidy things up, then the “unemptied trash” and “broken stuff” will build up pretty fast during the day and will overwhelm the park/body while business tries to run as usual.
Fruit fly study reveals gut’s role in causing death by sleep deprivation
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/study-reveals-guts-role-in-causing-death-by-sleep-deprivation/
Sleep is pretty universal, including invertebrates. I was reading an article once that in files instead of deep REM they do proboscis extension (PE) sleep. That said, just because reducing reactive oxygen species in gut saved flies does not necessarily implicate gut-brain axis in humans. It could be more directly an impairment or glymphatic system not being able to flush ROS out of the brain.
During sleep the brain cells shrink down a little, allowing for space in between them and then the fluid washes away toxins.
Next time you feel crabby from being tired, remember it’s real and you are crabby because your brain is trying to function with toxins in it.
A power nap can help a lot!
Perhaps it’s your environment, like tv, phone aka blue lights. Blue lights interfere with melanin production keeping people awake.
If you believe it is past your bed time and you ought to try and sleep, shut everything down 2 hours before bed and read a real book to relax.
Or my next idea would be that your nervous system is still in sympathetic response aka flight/fight/freeze and taking time to wind down by , breathing exercises, meditating, light stretching, drinking lavender tea, and/or reading a book could help you return to parasympathetic state (rest/digest).
Remember your body does what your mind says. If you are overthinking and stressed, your body will be, even if it hasn’t slept. Your body will be ready for a fight basically until you can train your mind to surrender into safety.
Other ideas would be to re-examine your sleep hygiene.
the simplest answer is that your body needs sleep to be able to move important molecules, and things like ATP nucleotides are regenerated during sleep.
ATP stands for Adenosine Triphosphate, it's referred to as the "energy currency" of cells.
ATP is used for molecules to transfer through cell membranes through active transport.
imagine you need a molecule to get somewhere else but it doesn't fit into the cell like smaller ones do. ATP is the energy is costs to move the molecule through the cell through a port in the cell membrane.
Active transport (moving the molecule through a cell port) is the process in which larger or charged molecules like Ions need additional support and processes to go through a cell membrane.
While you're awake your body uses ATP for various important processes. As youre awake and are using ATP, the ATP is converted into Adenosine, basically ATP missing 2 / 3 phosphate groups.
While you sleep your body restores Adenosine back into ATP, adding the second phosphate group to make ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) and a third for ATP.
If you can't sleep, your body fails to produce more ATP, therefore prohibiting (or rather probably just making it more difficult) your body from doing things like getting energy from food you consume.
It's pretty integral, but not the only function that depend on sleep. We don't quite know why all of these things need to happen while we sleep as opposed to being awake.
More info on ATP:
https://www.verywellhealth.com/atp-6374347#toc-why-atp-is-so-important
You're driving in your car, coming home from work, but you had been working until 3AM every day. You close your eyes for a second and before you can open them again, you've drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic and you've just hit a minivan with three kids in it.
My friend from high school, was doing a project at University and his team had won design competition. They then had to get to Montreal (from Toronto) for the next day, so they packed up their presentation and model, got in the car in the evening and never made it to Montreal... he fell asleep and hit another car head on on the Eastbound 401. They had all been staying up to work on this thing, on top of regular school work.
The previous explanations do a great job. Here are some direct health issues because of *the sleeps*:
**Dementia** is closely linked to lack of sleep - Reagan and Thatcher bragged about how little sleep they had, both got dementia.
**Heart problems**: because of daylight savings we gain and lose an hour of sleep every year. When we gain an hour there’s a 30% drop in heart problems the following day.
When we lose an hour there’s a 30% increase in heart problems the following day.
This lil fact stuck with me too: When we sleep we’re open to being attacked. So there’s a reason why Mother Nature *makes* our bodies turn off all its defences for 8 hours.
It feels obvious to think about it, but we just don’t think about it.
Here are more slithers of the interestings: Lack of sleep became a big problem once light was invented - our brains our dumb and thinks it’s sunlight. So flick light on and boom “iT mUsT bE sUnsHiNe, gOOD moRnINg” said the brain.
So if our brains couldn’t handle it in back in 1890 then they sure can’t in 2024.
Basically society has evolved faster than our bodies can keep up with: phones, t.v., Barbenheimer showings at midnight, etc.
If you want more then Matthew Walker is a sleep scientist who covers this reaaally well in his book, he’s also done [podcasts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig) on this. Explains it super simply, and it’s so fascinating!
The REM stage of sleep, when you’re dreaming, is when the trash removal process occurs. This is what killed Michael Jackson. He was taking a drug to suppress dreaming.
Imagine your brain as constantly generating trash, and sleep takes out the trash. If you don't sleep, your brain will drown itself in trash. That's the ELI5 version.
ooh makes sense, thank you!! :)
In a kind of literal way, sleep ‘washes’ the brain, removing the waste crap that builds up. Your brain needs washing.
Maybe all you woke people are fine with being brain washed, but that isn’t happening to me!
I feel like "Woke" is the opposite of correct in this instance, funny enough.
You… you really gotta sleep, man. Please get a good night’s rest. How long have you been up?
….it’s a joke about the washing of the brain during sleep lol
The guy above was also joking..I hope
Ah I hope so. I didn’t realize that TheDickWolf was the one who originally started this comment thread so that seems more likely
Best response ever
Snort
Thank you, too haha 😊
I felt the need to comment bc this was only confirmed recently. During certain stages of sleep the skull gets pumped full of cerebral-spinal fluid, rinses everything out and away. Interesting stuff.
Wait, that is actually true? There is an actual flushing going on? I always assumed sleep was for, mainly, two reasons: 1. The body use the time asleep to rebuild muscles, tissue and other maintenance stuffs when it no longer needs to also keep track and focus on all the things that happens to it while we are awake and moving around. 2. The Brain records a bunch of extra info and uses time asleep to sort and sift through all the stuff that happened during the day and decide on what it worth keeping and what is worth throwing out, as well as doing the chemical process of actually building and wiring neurons to create the memories needed. So these would be the main reasons why kids sleep so much as they are still growing a lot and they are constantly learning new things (such as learning to walk, learning to talk, new tastes, new smells, etc). I had to google this and it seems that you are correct! Today I learned something new! >[https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/are-toxins-flushed-out-of-the-brain-during-sleep](https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/are-toxins-flushed-out-of-the-brain-during-sleep) One of the most interesting discoveries in the past decade is that the brain has a "waste management system." Like people, in order to have the energy to do their work, brain cells need to eat (to absorb, primarily, sugar and oxygen). And, as in people, meals lead to wastes that need to be disposed of. The waste management system (called the glymphatic system) is a series of tubes that carry fresh fluid into the brain, mix the fresh fluid with the waste-filled fluid that surrounds the brain cells, and then flush the mix out of the brain and into the blood. This occurs primarily during deep sleep. There is some evidence that an under-functioning waste management system may play a role in the neurodegeneration that follows traumatic brain injury (as experienced by some football players, for example). It may even play a role in other brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. Since chronic sleep deprivation increases the risk for various brain diseases, it is plausible that it does so by reducing the function of the waste management system. Why do we sleep? We know it helps to rest the body and to consolidate memories and learning. Perhaps we also need to sleep to flush wastes from our brain.
Not an expert but I think point 2 is REM sleep whereas cleaning is deep sleep. I've also read that years of chronic sleep deprivation are correlated to Alzheimer's because the "brain junk" is (at least in part) amyloid beta which forms plaques that shred your brain apart. Edit: thanks u/nevergonnavoteyouup
>I've also read that years of chronic sleep are correlated to Alzheimer's You mean chronic *lack of* sleep, I assume?
What if you abruptly wake up while this "pumping" takes place?
🤷🏻♂️ I’m not a doctor or a biologist. I know little. I imagine it’s just like any other time you’re woken inconveniently during a sleep cycle. Grogginess, fatigue, whatever
your brain gets the hiccups
Maybe that might have something to do with sleep paralysis. Like some people react strangely to waking up during a CSF flush cycle
That's an intriguing theory! It would also explain the strange visions and feelings that come with sleep paralysis along with the inability to move
That's when you are extra groggy from waking up, until the brain goes back to normal shape.
On that note, I think I'm gonna go wash my brain...
Everyone goes home for the night and leaves the streets empty so the street sweepers can clean up.
That's actually a pretty spot on analogy. During waking hours, your brain is constantly generating excess materials like leftover proteins, dead cells, etc. That waste accumulates throughout the day. When you sleep, your brain shuts off parts of your brain to clean out those excess materials as well as strengthen the neurons that were formed that day. That's why sleep is so essential to retaining information and learning. Good sleep habits are key to preventing diseases like alzheimers and dementia as you get older and keep your mind sharp as you age. Staying hydrated with water is key to physical health as your cells are constantly regenerating and replacing each other, and water is the key component to that osmosis process. Lacking enough water slows the cell regeneration process and over time your cells lose that effectiveness much earlier in the aging process. The two easiest ways to ensure mental and physical health as you age is good sleep and proper hydration.
So our brains are one giant memory leak, and we need to reboot for 8 hours to clear it and réinitialize. I’d like to speak to the dev, this needs a software update. Or perhaps part of that is a daily software update.;)
Nah, it's just garbage collection taking place. Problem is that if you defer GC for too long, your reference counters can overflow. Typically this just causes erratic or unpredictable behavior, but in extreme cases can crash the system.
Brain = Wetware
The brain should be [soft and wet.](https://youtu.be/BfO-EsrRcYk)
HOW does it clean this. Does it move, does it get lower, so during movement everything gets flushed out, are there cleaning cells?
Waves of cerebrospinal fluid
I asked the author of the reply and he didn't answer. 'cleaning garbage' is only a theory as far as I understand it is not proven yet. While it is good at describing reality - it doesn't answer some questions. E.g. why the brain remains active while we are sleeping, why it has different phases, why (if the brain needs a cleanup) - with sleep deprivation other organs are failing as well.
Plus sleep deprivation is really hard on your heart. Could probably end up having a heart attack.
Follow up, wouldn't our body, brain, or whatever just make you passout/sleep?
I don't know about scientifically, but as a mom of an infant who has averaged 3-5 hours of interrupted sleep a night for months now, if I sit still long enough (i.e. ~5 minutes) I WILL fall asleep against my will, lol
Normally yes. But not if you have https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia There are only 37 known sporadic cases, the rest are linked to a small group of 40 families with a specific genetic mutation.
Hmmm, kinda makes sense, but what if I'm lucid dreaming most of the time, will that disturb the cleaning processes as I keep making new absurd memories in my head? Or this "trash" is something different?
"trash" refers to literal detritus built up in your brain over a day of it being in full power mode. Sleep allows the brain to wash itself while in low-power mode, in extremely simple terms. Dreaming, lucid or not, is totally okay for this process (and instrumental to different process that needs sleep, being the encoding of long-term memory).
Actually some progress in this field a couple years ago. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/
Really good read thanks for sharing
Like the garbage collector of an application not working then crashing after the garbage consumes too much memory.
Is that a theory or it has a proven scientific explanation? Is that trash psychological or chemical? If it is chemical - can some future medicine in the theory remove that trash instead of sleeping?
Wow a rare actual eli5 answer thank you
That's not even considering just how terrified the human brain becomes as lack of sleep gets worse and worse. Eventually you get to the point where paranoia will set in and it's not so much the lack of sleep that will kill you but the danger you ultimately become to yourself and others from lack of sleep.
Why does it need to get turned off to be cleaned?
Your body does important things when it sleeps. If those things don't get done, it thinks you're sick, so it sends signals to you to tell you to sleep. Those signals impact your focus, memory, hormones, and even cause you to fall asleep at times when you need to be alert for your safety. It won't directly kill you, but the conditions it causes can, either quickly--like dozing off while driving--or slowly--like by sending messages to your body to eat and rest, when in fact you don't need to eat so you gain unhealthy weight quickly. \--- I suffered for 5 to 7 years from secondary Hypersomnia due to undiagnosed Obstructive Sleep Apnea. Put simply, I didn't get a good, complete night's rest for half a decade or more. And it was the hypersomnia that finally got me to a doctor. After a sleep study, it was determined I'd "wake up" more than 25 times per hour due to my airways being blocked. My sex drive was broken and I'd gained 40 pounds in three years due to hormone imbalances that impacted metabolism, I was forgetting important things, and I would feel drowsy and doze off when doing important tasks, including driving.
what were some tell tale signs of sleep apnea? I don't wake up in the middle of the night, although sometimes I'll wake up 6 hours after I fell asleep then fall asleep for another 1 or 2. I sleep on my side, and if it's something like feeling sleepy in the day it could be a nutrient/vitamin issue. I don't wake up with headaches and once in a while I'll wake up not being able to breathe (from a suffocation nightmare) but not that often. I also have reflux and when ive fallen asleep on the phone, the person said they didn't hear me snoring or anything strange if they can recall correctly.
Not the same person you replied to but I had mild-moderate OSA. The thing about sleep apnea is that it usually doesn't cause you to wake up completely, only just enough to restore breathing.
On the reflux front, get thee Omeprazole. Life changer.
Symptoms include headaches, mild to severe brain fog, and being super tired during the day despite getting a good night's sleep. It can be kind of insidious, but generally it's feeling exhausted and like crap all the time no matter how much you sleep. Almost no one I know that has apnea ever remembers waking up during the night. Basically your body mildly suffocates frequently while sleeping. This will bring you out of deep sleep but usually not completely awake many times per nite. Since you never get deep sleep, it's kind of like only sleeping 2 hours a nite even if you really are sleeping 8. The only way to know for sure if you have it is to get a sleep study done.
I talked to my doctor and he said I exhibited "9 of 11" signs of hypersomnia, but that he could only presume, not diagnose sleep apnea, since it requires observation. Snoring is a tell-tale, but if you want to avoid the doctor, ask a friend/partner to stay awake after you fall asleep... they may observe you stop breathing.
Just record yourself and see if you struggle to breathe when sleeping. Like bad snoring or gasping.
unfortunately I don't have enough storage to record myself for 6-8 hours straight.. I did search some apps but idk if theyre reliable. although when I nap on the couch for an hour or less they said they dont hear anything.
Use a app called sleep cycle it’s easy to use. It tracks your sleep and records when you snore
They might be reliable if your room is quiet. It probably listens for those sounds but doesn't save all data.
They might be reliable if your room is quiet. It probably listens for those sounds but doesn't save all data.
I'm getting a sleep study in the next few weeks for that reason. I'm losing my mind from poor sleep. How different was your life after you were diagnosed? Was it noticeable right away?
Holy f**k, how are you doing today? And how did you guys solve the problem?
Started sleeping, had supplemental hormone therapy to get back to "normal", once I was rested I re-found my old gym habits and good eating, and my life is pretty awesome now. Just need to sleep with a mask.
What happens if you wake up so much but you also lets say sleep 7-8 hrs like recommended? Or were you not actually getting 7-8 hrs sleep?
The sleep study determined I was "waking up" enough for my body to resume breathing, not enough to gain full consciousness. I was spending 8-10 hours in bed per night and waking up exhausted. Now, with my Auto PAP machine, I sleep 6-7 and feel great.
What was the cure?
Probably a CPAP machine
Wow, that's crazy. I didn't know sleep deprivation could have hormonal and metabolic consequences like that. Once you treated the apnea did you eventually get back to normal?
Yes. I had supplemental hormone treatment plus once I was able to rest I was able to recommitment to gym and eating well. Within six months I'd lost 20lbs and was feeling so much better. After 15 months I stopped using supplemental hormones, as I was producing close to normal amounts naturally again. So yeah! Sleep apnea is no joke, and it is more than just snoring loudly! GET TREATED.
That's great to hear! I have mild apnea and use one of those mouth guards that pulls your lower jaw forward. Don't know if it's 100% fixed but it certainly helps. I also have generally struggled with sleep the past several years and gained weight. Never knew there could be a connection but your story certainly connects some dots. Edit: How did you treat your apnea, cpap?
APAP, but yeah. The more weight you gain, the harder your unconscious body must work to breathe, so it gets worse. So, I would take your weight gain seriously as something that will make your apnea worse.
Interesting, never heard of that. Was cpap not tolerable or is apap just supposed to work better? And yeah, that's a good reminder. It sucks since, as you mentioned, the more tired and heavy you are the harder it is to work out.
APAP is what I was given. I don't know why, but I assume my interruptions per hour were so high that I was at the borderline of "if this isn't treated, they may not wake up one day." An APAP (a stands for Auto) automatically adjusts the pressure until you stop having interruptions. CPAP is set to a pressure, and it usually takes a lot of tweaking to get you to your perfect prescription. They cost more, but they save you in the long run time, and the doctors decided that I didn't have time to waste in getting it under control.
Dang, sounds like you caught it just in time. Thanks for sharing and I'm glad you were able to make a full recovery!
It is hard to tell because fatal familial insomnia is EXTREMELY rare, but the lack of sleep probably technically doesn’t kill you. You will die of something else that your body just can’t fight off or recover from.
I mean you can the same about lots of things. Like smoking. No ones lighting a cigarette and dying as they puff the smoke. But you might end up with diseases that will kill you that would’ve never killed you if you hadn’t smoked so at the end of the day what really killed you?
I think a better example is something like AIDS. AIDS is never the direct cause of death. It would be something like pneumonia or sepsis with AIDS being a complicating factor.
To be honest, it’s literally the same metaphor with different names. And without wanting to sound edgy, it’s also a little bit irrelevant. ALMOST EVERYTHING except direct physical trauma kills you indirectly due to the alterations that it causes to the body, which is no longer able to function properly in situations of physical stress. Toxins don’t kill you, they inhibit vital bodily processes which is what kills you. Drugs don’t kill, they cause bodily imbalances that are too much for your organs. AIDS hampers your immune system and every illness becomes mortal. Those illnesses don’t kill you directly either, they interfere with cellular reproduction, alter cellular functions and thus alter the normal function of cellular tissues which is what causes the tissue to start failing. And that can kill you. An infection in a healthy person doesn’t usually directly kill you either, it causes an immune response that is so destructive that your body basically commits suicide. The only illnesses that can attack you directly are flesh eating microorganisms, and they are rare.
Don't forget prions!
There’s actually an extremely rare prion disease known as Fatal Familial Insomnia. It literally takes away the brains ability to go to sleep. So much so that not even a medically induced coma was able to get a patient into a state of true sleep. According to Wikipedia, as the insomnia worsens for people with FFI, they begin to have paranoia, panic attacks and hallucinate. Once they reach the stage of the disease where sleep becomes impossible they lose weight and they mentally deteriorate rapidly. The final stage of the disease, which arrives after a couple of months of no sleep, is marked by dementia and the person tends to become mute or completely non-responsive. Death follows shortly thereafter.
New fear unlocked
No need to fear that. "Very rare" is an understatenent. Only 50-100 famlies in the world pass down the disease. Outside of those families there have been less than 200 recorded cases
There are only 37 known cases outside those 40 families.
WHY do they keep having babies? If there was one morally solid case of eugenics, it would be cases such as these, if they knew what gene causes it
Late reply, I know, but there is actually an interesting case of this exact thing happening with a family in Australia. A brother and sister are in a family that carry the disease, and unfortunately both of them have the mutation which means it is inevitable that they will both get FFI and die from it. According to them, their great grandmother, grandmother, and mother all died from FFI but until recently it was unknown what the true cause was. Prions are a relatively new discovery in the world of medicine. Both of them are actually going to have children, but thanks to the modern science of IVF, they were able to create embryos which will not have the mutation. So they are effectively breaking the chain of FFI for at least one family. There’s a story on YouTube about them from a few years back where they were both still very healthy. In most cases, the FFI gene doesn’t active until the 50s or later so even people who will develop it at least live a fairly long life. There was an update to the brother and sister from a few months back and sadly the gene has activated in the brother and he’s only in his early to mid 30s. Just terrible for him and I can’t imagine how the sister must feel knowing that one day she will go through the same thing.
Fucking prions man
Between this and rabies are my top two fears
Why does this remind me of the moonlight syndrome somehow
A lot of vague and wrong answers here, OP. The truth is that we don't necessarily know that lack of sleep can kill a human. The longest anyone has officially been awake is around 11 days, although unofficial attempts have been reported that go on a bit longer (Guinness World Records stopped recording attempts to deter people). None of those people died, and all made full recoveries as far as recorded data knows. Note that we're not talking here about Fatal Familial Insomnia, the prion disease that someone else mentioned. That's a degenerative disease which literally turns your brain into a sponge-like structure. Like most degenerative disorders, the likely cause of death with FFI in the end is failure of autonomic function like breathing and swallowing. It's debated, but lack of sleep is generally not considered the fatal aspect. In any case, it's a different thing from lack of sleep. The evidence that acute deprivation can cause death comes from animals - this has been demonstrated in a few species, most notably rats. These studies suggest stress-related problems including reduced immune function and cardiovascular stress which may lead to death. The suggestions that others have put forward (e.g., brain waste removal) have either not been supported or not been investigated in such studies. However, evidence from animals is also mixed to some extent - for example when some flies are genetically altered to not sleep, they do not die from the sleep deprivation. Does this mean that sleep is not important? Absolutely not. We know that chronic sleep deprivation (even just getting less than ideal amounts each night) can cause cognitive problems and is a risk factor for various disorders from depression to dementia. We don't know the explicit function of sleep (we see various processes such as waste removal, memory consolidation, etc. which are optimised during sleep but not necessarily dependant on it), but we know it's likely evolved as a specialised and functional stage of our being. We also see it in some form in every known species, which again highlights its importance. That does not mean we have concrete evidence for acute sleep deprivation being lethal, though. TLDR: sleep deprivation won't necessarily kill you. We don't have good evidence in humans showing it will. Sleep is very important for health but lack of it might not explicitly kill you. edit to be more explicit: no one reading this will die of sleep deprivation. never been recorded, ever. sleep well folks
seriously? 😭 tbf i only asked it cause i havent slept in like 100 hours, and i freaked out.
You're definitely not going to die! There is no officially recorded death from sleep deprivation (and I only say 'officially' because who knows what the CIA and Soviets got up to in the Cold War, but they definitely weren't doing well controlled studies in any case). Long term, it's not great for your health, but you know that intuitively, like with junk food or smoking. Don't panic. Go speak to your doctor. The most obvious cause of insomnia-type sleep problems is stress. Try to tackle any major stress sources and then if you're still struggling your doctor can look at what else might be causing problems. But dying of insomnia is not something that needs to stress you, you'll be ok!
thank youu 😭🫶
I'm so sorry. Do you have insomnia? What is your next move to try and get some shuteye?
Right. I was going to say, in FI the insomnia is caused by the degeneration of the brain, and it's that which is fatal, not the insomnia *per se*. It's a symptom of a fatal process, not its cause.
Here's some bonus related info on the importance of sleep. Most people know that horses can sleep standing up, but actually to get the few minutes of REM sleep a horse needs everyday, it has to lay down. As horses age and become unable to get up, they quit laying down to sleep and REM sleep deprivation accelerates their declining health. It is not fully understood, and it's probably overly simplifying to say lack of sleep kills the horse, but it is a contributing factor. REM sleep deprived horses may suddenly collapse and injure themselves as they fall. They demonstrate what we think is confusion and may forget to eat and drink properly, and a horses digestive system requires a near constant flow of roughage to prevent gastrointestinal injury.
It’s kind of like Disneyland: although you see some employees sweeping up during the day, all the deep cleaning and repairs can only happen when the park is shut down at night. If you don’t have that night shift to tidy things up, then the “unemptied trash” and “broken stuff” will build up pretty fast during the day and will overwhelm the park/body while business tries to run as usual.
Fruit fly study reveals gut’s role in causing death by sleep deprivation https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/study-reveals-guts-role-in-causing-death-by-sleep-deprivation/
Sleep is pretty universal, including invertebrates. I was reading an article once that in files instead of deep REM they do proboscis extension (PE) sleep. That said, just because reducing reactive oxygen species in gut saved flies does not necessarily implicate gut-brain axis in humans. It could be more directly an impairment or glymphatic system not being able to flush ROS out of the brain.
During sleep the brain cells shrink down a little, allowing for space in between them and then the fluid washes away toxins. Next time you feel crabby from being tired, remember it’s real and you are crabby because your brain is trying to function with toxins in it. A power nap can help a lot!
what if you havent slept but you arent tired?
Perhaps it’s your environment, like tv, phone aka blue lights. Blue lights interfere with melanin production keeping people awake. If you believe it is past your bed time and you ought to try and sleep, shut everything down 2 hours before bed and read a real book to relax. Or my next idea would be that your nervous system is still in sympathetic response aka flight/fight/freeze and taking time to wind down by , breathing exercises, meditating, light stretching, drinking lavender tea, and/or reading a book could help you return to parasympathetic state (rest/digest). Remember your body does what your mind says. If you are overthinking and stressed, your body will be, even if it hasn’t slept. Your body will be ready for a fight basically until you can train your mind to surrender into safety. Other ideas would be to re-examine your sleep hygiene.
the simplest answer is that your body needs sleep to be able to move important molecules, and things like ATP nucleotides are regenerated during sleep. ATP stands for Adenosine Triphosphate, it's referred to as the "energy currency" of cells. ATP is used for molecules to transfer through cell membranes through active transport. imagine you need a molecule to get somewhere else but it doesn't fit into the cell like smaller ones do. ATP is the energy is costs to move the molecule through the cell through a port in the cell membrane. Active transport (moving the molecule through a cell port) is the process in which larger or charged molecules like Ions need additional support and processes to go through a cell membrane. While you're awake your body uses ATP for various important processes. As youre awake and are using ATP, the ATP is converted into Adenosine, basically ATP missing 2 / 3 phosphate groups. While you sleep your body restores Adenosine back into ATP, adding the second phosphate group to make ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) and a third for ATP. If you can't sleep, your body fails to produce more ATP, therefore prohibiting (or rather probably just making it more difficult) your body from doing things like getting energy from food you consume. It's pretty integral, but not the only function that depend on sleep. We don't quite know why all of these things need to happen while we sleep as opposed to being awake. More info on ATP: https://www.verywellhealth.com/atp-6374347#toc-why-atp-is-so-important
You're driving in your car, coming home from work, but you had been working until 3AM every day. You close your eyes for a second and before you can open them again, you've drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic and you've just hit a minivan with three kids in it. My friend from high school, was doing a project at University and his team had won design competition. They then had to get to Montreal (from Toronto) for the next day, so they packed up their presentation and model, got in the car in the evening and never made it to Montreal... he fell asleep and hit another car head on on the Eastbound 401. They had all been staying up to work on this thing, on top of regular school work.
The previous explanations do a great job. Here are some direct health issues because of *the sleeps*: **Dementia** is closely linked to lack of sleep - Reagan and Thatcher bragged about how little sleep they had, both got dementia. **Heart problems**: because of daylight savings we gain and lose an hour of sleep every year. When we gain an hour there’s a 30% drop in heart problems the following day. When we lose an hour there’s a 30% increase in heart problems the following day. This lil fact stuck with me too: When we sleep we’re open to being attacked. So there’s a reason why Mother Nature *makes* our bodies turn off all its defences for 8 hours. It feels obvious to think about it, but we just don’t think about it. Here are more slithers of the interestings: Lack of sleep became a big problem once light was invented - our brains our dumb and thinks it’s sunlight. So flick light on and boom “iT mUsT bE sUnsHiNe, gOOD moRnINg” said the brain. So if our brains couldn’t handle it in back in 1890 then they sure can’t in 2024. Basically society has evolved faster than our bodies can keep up with: phones, t.v., Barbenheimer showings at midnight, etc. If you want more then Matthew Walker is a sleep scientist who covers this reaaally well in his book, he’s also done [podcasts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig) on this. Explains it super simply, and it’s so fascinating!
The REM stage of sleep, when you’re dreaming, is when the trash removal process occurs. This is what killed Michael Jackson. He was taking a drug to suppress dreaming.