VIDEO. These Reasons Why Your Brain Needs Sleep

“I need my eight hours of sleep. And yet, it is not so easy to get there.“Are you getting the necessary eight hours of sleep, or less? Steven Laureys is a neurologist, and according to him, sleeping for eight hours is absolutely essential for everyone. “Most of us, we wake up to an alarm clock, we drink, it’s hard to stay awake during the day, in meetings, in front of a red light, that indicates that we have a chronic sleep debt and that is not good”, he explains.

“’OK, I’m going to recover at the end of the week’, it’s not a good idea”

But why is it so important? When we sleep, the brain assimilates all the information of the day, and new learning. Thus, lack of sleep causes loss of this faculty: “We lose in what we call cognitive flexibility. What does it mean ? It means adapting to a changing reality. It is very relevant to my profession as a doctor. I see a patient in the emergency room, I examine him, I say to myself ‘ah, myocardial infarction’. And then the tests come in, it’s clearly not that at all, but I no longer have the ability to change my mind. Sleep allows me to be more lucid, more intelligent, to make the right decisions and therefore, yes, sleeping is not a waste of time.”

“In fact, sleep, what does he like? It is regularity. It’s a bit boring maybe, but ideally, we should try to go to bed at the same time and wake up around the same time on weekdays, on weekends, because saying ‘OK, I’m going to recover at the end of week’, it’s not a good idea”, adds the neurologist.