How Sleep Deprivation is Destroying Your Productivity, and How to Counter It

Expressions such as ”burning the midnight oil” sure do look good on a nice shiny plaque, however, they hold little in terms of practical application, especially considering what we now know about sleep deprivation and its impact on our productivity and overall health. Yes, there are rare instances which require us to push past midnight; however, continuously depriving yourself of quality sleep will literally drive you into the ground. Within this article, we will discuss why a lack of sleep does a lot more harm than good and what measures you could take to improve your sleeping habits . 1. It messes with your memory. When we aren’t well rested, it does a lot more to us than just make us feel groggy. From helping us navigate everyday life to excelling at our work, our memory is pretty much the most important part of the equation. And chronic lack of sleep can quite literally bring our progress and life to a grinding halt. To understand how sleep deprivation impacts our memory, it’s important to first explore how our memory functions. There are 3 key phases of human memory. Acquisition, this is when we acquire new knowledge. Consolidation, when information becomes a part of our neural database. Recall, as the term implies, is when we pull out the stored information for our use. Sleep deprivation impacts all three phases. To start with, we won’t be able to focus, which means our brain’s retention capacity will be significantly handicapped. hippocampus is the part of our brain that’s responsible for new memory formation. For new information to “consolidate”, it must be transferred to the prefrontal cortex, where new information is housed. Sleep deprivation disturbs this process by preventing most of the newly acquired information from reaching the prefrontal cortex. Here’s a comprehensive […]

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