The Huge, Hidden Benefits Of An Extra Hour Of Sleep
It’s weird that we sometimes think we can go without sleep–since we’d be so much more productive with just a bit more.
The BBC’s Michael Mosley reports that increasing the quanitity of time spent slumbering by a mere hour can upgrade the quality of your sleep. This, in turn, upgrades the quality of your day–in at least three ways.
YOU’LL GET MORE MEMORIES.
One of the first phases of sleep is deep sleep, which, as Mosley reports, is a super active time:
Deep sleep sounds restful, but that’s when our brains are actually working hard. One of the main things the brain is doing is moving memories from short-term storage into long-term storage, allowing us more short-term memory space for the next day. If you don’t get adequate deep sleep then these memories will be lost.
Which is scary because memories are important. And what we must note here is that there is such a thing as banking sleep–where you get a ton of sleep for a few nights if you know you won’t get any sleep on another night–you can’t bank you memories. They need to be committed within 24 hours of forming.