Is getting 6 hours of sleep one night and 10 hours the next equivalent to sleeping 8 hours and 8 hours?
In: Biology
No.
One of sleep’s key functions is its ability to “save” and “cleanse” our memories.
Sleep can be classified into two stages: REM and NREM sleep. One looks at all the memories you have had in a day, and removes all the extraneous information. The other takes the remaining information, and strengthens its connections. This process repeats numerous times to fully process all your memories, similar to making a stone sculpture.
All this is to say that sleep is a long process that requires many hours to cleanse and polish, cleanse and polish your memories for that specific day. And if you don’t sleep that day, you basically “miss the boat”, and you’ll never get a chance to reinforce those memories again.
Obviously sleep has countless benefits, physical, emotional – its hard to find a function of the human body that isn’t affected by sleep, and it’s harder to find one that runs optimally without it.
Its just that I personally think this aspect of “memories” and “missing the boat” is the most important point to consider in terms of sleep debt, and it being impossible to pay back.
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