A New, Disturbing Fact About How Sleep Affects Your Brain
We've all heard about the millions of studies that say getting eight hours of sleep a night is really, really good for you. But for the first time, scientists have found that not sleeping enough could actually damage your brain. That's pretty scary stuff.
Related: 9 Reasons You Can't Sleep (and What to Do About Them)
Researchers from the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania subjected test mice to just four to five hours of sleep over a 24-hour period, similar to the sleep patterns of people who do late-night or shift work. After three days of this, the poor sleep-deprived mice experienced a 25% loss of locus ceruleus (LC) neurons in a particular section of the brain stem. LCs are brain cells that play an important part in alertness and cognitive function.
Related: Eating These Foods Could Help You Sleep Better
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first one to show that sleep deprivation can lead to permanent brain damage -- if only, for now, in mice. Researchers plan to extend their studies to humans by doing autopsies of late-night and shift workers to look at their brain cells.
Related: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Dreams
These results are a pretty good reason to make your snooze time a priority, especially since the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced that sleeplessness is now "epidemic" in the U.S. According to their survey of almost 75,000 adults, 35% said they got less than seven hours of sleep a night.
- By Natalie Gontcharova
More from Good Housekeeping:
