Today in our Nervous Tissue lecture, we’re going to talk about the amazing way the brain cleans itself during sleep using what is now known as the glymphatic system.

I wanted to share a bit more here about why getting enough sleep is so very important for your health.  This post is all optional reading. However, I’d strongly urge you to glance through this post and see if anything catches your eye.

Sleep is SO important to our health.

But WHY? What happens if you don’t get enough sleep (other than you feel like crap)?

Researchers have shown that when we don’t get enough sleep (meaning, less than 7 hours per night):

• All-cause mortality goes up significantly
• The incidence of cancer increases significantly (see the WHO declaration below!)
• Learning, memory processing, and the long-term storage of new information are all significantly impaired. So you can study like crazy, but if you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t reap the benefits of all that work. 

Here are some really good resources I think you’ll find eye-opening (if not a little scary!).

1. Here’s a short Ted talk that describes exactly how the glymphatic system works.

2. The book  “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker is THE best book I’ve read about sleep.

• Matthew Walker is one of the worlds leading sleep researchers and also a really personable and nice guy (according to a friend of mine who knows him professionally).
• This guy really knows his stuff, and he presents lots of new information about sleep and why it is so critical to our health.
• The audiobook is really good (it is read by the author, who is a great narrator).

3. Here’s a Joe Rogan interview with Matthew Walker:

• Here are the podcast notes if you’re interested but don’t want to watch the whole thing.
• As he does in his book, Matthew talks here about some pretty mind-blowing facts that are way beyond the usual stuff we hear all the time.
• For example, the The World Health Organization has classified shift work as a probable carcinogen, based on the overwhelming research evidence that insufficient sleep is linked to significantly increased risk of certain types of cancer (colon, prostate, and breast). Yikes.

4. Here’s a short video by Matthew Walker that summarizes many of bad things that happen if you don’t get enough sleep.