Sleep helps us recover. Sleep helps restore the immune system and repair brain tissue. Bats and many other small animals burn a lot of calories, producing free radicals, molecules that are toxic to neurons. Sleep sweeps away this toxic waste (Xie et al., 2013). Sleeping gives resting neurons time to repair, rewire, and reorganize themselves (Gilestro et al., 2009; Tononi & Girelli, 2013). Think of it this way: When consciousness leaves your house, workers come in for a makeover.
Sleep helps us restore and rebuild fading memories of the day’s experiences. Sleep strengthens neural connections and replays recent learning (Yang et al., 2014). During sleep, the brain shifts memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus to permanent storage in areas of the cortex (Diekelmann & Bom, 2010; Racsmány et al., 2010). Children and adults trained to perform tasks recall them better after a night’s sleep, or even after a short nap, than after several hours awake (Friedrich et al., 2015; Kurdziel et al., 2013; Stickgold & Ellenbogen, 2008), Sleep, it seems, strengthens memories in a way that being awake does not.
Sleep feeds creative thinking. A full night’s sleep boosts our thinking and leaning. After working on a task, then sleeping on it, people solve problems more insightfully than do those who stay awake (Barrett, 2011; Sio et al., 2013). They also are better at spotting connections among novel pieces of infor mation (Ellenbogen et al., 2007). To think smart and see connections, it often pays to sleep on it.
The Sacred Shift | Intuitive Guidance With Suzette Lindo 