Why can our body get tired when it does not get enough sleep, but it cannot get extra energy from sleeping too much?
In: 11
Sleeping is basically your body’s way of cleaning your body and brain up, repairing, sorting memories, etc. Just general maintenance. It doesn’t really give you energy (that’s food), but not having done the maintenance just makes everything harder to do with the energy you have, so you feel like you have less of it.
As a winter metaphor, consider your driveway. If there’s too much snow on it, you might have problems getting traction with your tires, or pushing through the snow. No matter how powerful your engine or how much gas in the tank, you’re going to spin your tires while making not much forward progress. Your car doesn’t have any less energy than when the driveway is clear, but it feels like it has less because it’s so much harder to move forward with what it has.
So, you remove the snow, you chip off as much ice as you can, you put down salt to melt whatever’s left, and sand for extra traction and… then what? Once you’re down to bare asphalt, there’s nothing else left you can do. Your driveway is clear. There’s no snow to block your way, no ice or slush to lose traction in. There’s nothing else you can do to your driveway to make your car function any better on it.
That’s like being all caught up on sleep: you’ve had enough, and all the maintenance is done, so there’s nothing left to do to make your body and brain function better.
Latest Answers