The Importance of Sleep.
Alarm bells started ringing as soon as the headline hit me, “No sleep means no new brain cells”.
Missing out on sleep may cause the brain to stop producing new cells, a study has suggested.
The work on rats, by a team from Princeton University found a lack of sleep affected the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories.
The research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showed a stress hormone causes the effect.
A UK expert said it would be interesting to see if too little rather than no sleep had the same consequence.
This has more meaning as someone who nodded off in the middle of a serious meeting at work recently. The thing is for years now I have been an insomniac and that means that I cannot for years remember the morning I woke up fresh and full of energy. As a result, during the day at work when normal people are buzzing with mental and physical energy, I feel so weak and tired and see myself nodding off whenever I have nothing to do. As from 7pm onwards each day, I get this surge of adrenalin that goes on till very late resulting in my inability to fall asleep in good time. I did mention here that one of my New Year revolutions is to go to bed early everyday yet that has been extremely difficult. I do go to bed early but falling asleep is another thing. I normally eventually nod-off around 2-3 am having actually being lying in bed around 9-10 pm. And considering I have to get up at 6am for work the next day – 4 hours sleep tops leaves me gagging for more sleep. Even at weekends I wake up around 8am after going to bed generally later [3-4am].
Any ideas will be highly cherished.
