Why does my 15 hours of sleep on the weekend not counteract the 4 hours I get on a weeknight?
In: Biology
While your brain works, it slowly creates byproducts by standard biological processes, like most of your body, and these byproducts need to be removed from the system. Throughout the day, your brain slowly swells as it works, and this swelling reduces how efficiently your body can “clean away” the byproducts in your brain. You need to sleep so your body can balance the cleaning rate with the production rate of the byproducts. The swelling also goes away when you sleep, as the brain is used less.
When you don’t sleep, the swelling doesn’t go away, and continues to increase, making you even worse at maintaining the brain. This is why eventually you can die from lack of sleep.
When you wake up well rested, your brain is as “not-swollen” as it can be, and as “clean” as it can be. You can’t get more ready for stuff, and you can’t clean away byproducts that aren’t there yet!
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