what is physiologically happening when my brain feels “heavy” at the end of a long, busy work day?
In: 1026
Your brain is composed of neurons that send little jolts of ‘electricity’ to function. I say ‘electricity’ as it’s not, but usually the differences don’t matter, in this case it does.
Your neurons send their jolts of electricity by moving charged atoms across their membrane (inside to outside or the other way). They need to take time to set up a balance of these atoms so that when they’re triggered they can rapidly respond. If you make a neuron fire repetitively it will unbalance these atoms faster than it can balance and will reach a point it can’t fire. You can see this effect easily with semantic sanitation whereby you say or read a word a lot in a short amount of time and it becomes temporarily meaningless. The neurons in charge of adding meaning to that word are unbalanced and can’t fire so you lose that function. There are things your body can do to make them able to fire more often but regardless every neuron needs some rest.
In addition to the unbalanced neurons, sleep removes a large amount of toxins that your brain naturally produces, so you build up toxins while you’re awake then clear (hopefully) them all while you sleep. The combination of unbalanced neurons and toxin build up is interpreted as a heavy sluggish feeling to discourage you from thinking as much and encourage you to start resting to fix both of these
Latest Answers