How exactly does sleep replenish our energy and how is it different/better than things such as coffee and energy drinks? Why do we need 8 hours of it?
In: Biology
They don’t…. sleeping does not save energy/conserve or restore energy scientists dont actually know why we sleep other than we need to sleep.
Your brain and body really regenerate during sleep. Why this is needed is still a current topic of research and there is a debate why we developed like this. One theory is that it conserves energy to be only awake during the half of the day where our eyes actually work well.
Caffeine doesn’t give you any energy, it just supresses the tiredness hormone so you don’t feel that you should sleep.
There is still quite a lot we don’t understand about sleep and what roles it plays in mental and physical health. One of the main reasons we feel tired is because of a hormone that builds up in our brains during waking hours, once enough builds up, it triggers our desire for sleep.
We know sleep is necessary for a great deal of neurological housekeeping, breaking down harmful proteins and plaque buildups. And for breaking down unused, and strengthening used, synaptic pathways (the things that let the different parts of our brain communicate). As for its affect on energy, I don’t know any studies regarding that, but I haven’t looked for them.
Regarding caffeine: Caffeine is a wonderful addictive compound that, when ingested, can actually increase your heart rate. The extra blood moving through your body means your brain and body get a shot of extra energy, at least until you metabolize all the caffeine and crash.
Caffeine should NOT be used as an alternative to sleep. In fact, using that much caffeine and not sleeping for an extended period can both lead to health problems. And, because of the neurological housekeeping I mention above, staying awake with caffeine instead of sleeping means that your brain will stop working well surpsingly quickly, and all of the logical decision making and problem solving capabilities that make you an effective human will go out the window.
Deep sleep is crucial for us to process and store memories. Experiments show that during REM sleep, our brains are reviewing events that happened since the last deep sleep, and committing some of them to memory. Our brains are also trying to figure out solutions to problems that we encountered. Almost all animals do this as well. A rat will review mazes in its sleep, looking for a solution to finding that elusive piece of cheese.
Caffeine is a stimulant that temporarily delays sleep. Eventually, though, your body will force you to sleep because it needs to do all those housekeeping chores mentioned by the other posters.
Caffeine doesn’t give you energy it stood you feeling tired by blocking the receptors in your muscles to the steroids that make you feel tired.
Long term caffeine users only get brought up to the same level as non-caffeine users as long term use increases the receptors in the muscles as the body knows it’s producing the message that you’re tired but not getting a response from the muscles.
If you’re tired sleep or eat an apple, it has a good mix of slow and quick release energy sources.
Energy drinks do however also contain B vitamins which do give you energy if you’re lacking in. Vitamins from other parts of your diet, a serious lack of B vitamins results in Beri Beri and while I’m not entirely sure on the mechanics of it i recall it’s something to do with having energy but no way of creating a way for it to be harnessed. (I suggest researching it elsewhere)
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