Does Not Sleeping Really Affect Your Brain?

Introduction

There are countless teens staying up to scroll on TikTok, play video games, study, or for other reasons but how does this end up impacting us negatively? The biggest part that is impacted is your brain. We all hear that getting enough sleep is important, however is it really as important as people make it out to be? Yes, of course! Getting enough hours of sleep each night no matter the circumstance, should be a priority! I will say this is difficult when you are out with family or friends when you may stay up past the time you usually go to sleep. What you probably do not acknowledge is that those what may seem little hours, are still better than none at all. This is a topic I am eager to write about. We all sleep everyday and I think that this is a significant topic to bring up especially since sleep is something none of us can go without! Today I will be sharing some of the major negative effects on our brain when we are sleep deprived.

The negative effects on our brain

If you had to guess about some of effects from not getting enough sleep with little knowledge about the brain, you would probably guess that you would be feeling tired the whole day. Although, there is so much more going on then just being tired from constantly not getting enough sleep. A study about the consequences of sleep deprivation by Krause et al., discovered that your attention is affected by sleep deprivation. It is stated that it can vary among individuals and some may be more vulnerable to their attention getting weakened. Another part of your brain in the study is your working memory. But what is the cause of how our working memory and attention are being altered? As stated by Krause et al., "Deficits in both working- memory and attention tasks have been found to correlate with reductions in DLPFC and posterior parietal activity." With a lack of sleep, you will notice that you can not focus in school and that you feel as if you are struggling to learn. These two may be some of the more obvious factors of how sleep deprivation can influence your brain so let's go a little bit more into some systems that you may not be familiar with! A third issue in a sleep-deprived brain is reward processing. The study says, "SD triggers a generalized increase in reward sensitivity that impairs reward discrimination accuracy." In simpler terms, if you do not get enough sleep, rewards that are actually not so amazing may get overhyped by your brain. You may do something at a certain moment because it seems so great to you but maybe later you may realize that it was not as you had thought. This is not good because this can cause you to make bad choices that you might regret later. There are so many functions in your brain that can be affected by sleep deprivation and I am going to share one more. The last function that can be negatively changed is the hippocampal. This study found that it is affected in many ways such as reducing it’s long term potential, synthesis of proteins that are with neuroplasticity, learning and encoding related activity, and more. (Krause et al., 2017)

My tips for getting enough sleep

Now that I have explained to you all of different negative effects of not sleeping enough, I want to share some of my personal tips! My biggest tip is to plan out your day and adjust all your activities/tasks to the time you want to go to sleep. For example, if you want to go to sleep around 10 then you should stop doing everything at around 9:30 so that you can prepare to go to sleep. Even if you have a lot of homework or need to study, do it earlier in the day so that you do not have to stay up all night and get into a bad habit. To be honest, my personal preference is to study during the day because I know it is harder for me to focus at night since all I am thinking about is going to sleep. This can be harder in certain situations if you have a sport and don’t get home till late but I still recommend finding time during breaks at school, during the day, or free time during class. My second tip is to stop staying on your phone scrolling on TikTok all night. I think a lot if people are susceptible to this. It’s really easy to get caught up in the moment and not realize what time it is when you are scrolling. This used to happen to me a lot last school year. Although, I learned that I should stop scrolling at a certain time. Some people love being on their phone more than others so I know it is harder depending on the person. That app will always be there and you will regret staying up all night when you arrive to school the next day. The last tip is not having caffeine late at night. I am not sure if anyone does this, even so it should still be avoided. That is all the tips I have. I really just suggest seeing what works for you. Some people like reading and I feel like it differs from person to person! Find what you enjoy!

Conclusion

To wrap things up, there are so many things to say about a sleep deprived brain. The main points that I talked about was attention, working memory, reward processing, and hippocampal. These are all significant in our daily lives. I did not know what was directly influenced by how much sleep we get every night and so this post was really great to write. I can definitely say it makes me want to make sure I get my recommended hours of sleep every night. I hope everyone was able to learn something new or just have fun reading this. Let me know if you guys have any suggestions on what you guys would like me to write about. I am really open to any ideas! Thank you for reading, remember you are not alone!

Works Cited

Krause, Adam J, et al. “The Sleep-Deprived Human Brain.” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, U.S. National Library of Medicine, July 2017, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6143346/#S10.