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!
You can bank sleep according to some studies. Military and shift workers who may need to work through sleep cycles can use this to improve mental and physical capabilities during extended wakefulness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4667377/
Your brain is like a bunch of young kids cooped up in a house. Throughout the day, the kids are running around making messes, and the dishes and laundry they use keep piling up. The adult(s) can’t take care of the mess until the kids aren’t needing constant attention. You can fall behind on tidying and cleaning but even if you have extra time, you can’t clean up the next day’s messes before they happen.
The brain is similar. While it’s awake, it builds up “messiness” that it can’t take care of until it’s asleep, when the body and brain slow down enough to focus on cleaning up the mess.
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