Why Do We Need Sleep?

Photo by Lux Graves on Unsplash

The truth is: we still have no clue.

The reason for sleep, why we do it and why we need it, is still a mystery and no one has figured out why it is so important.

What psychologists do have discovered are two points that have led to countless theories.

1. There is a molecule inside your brain that causes you to feel sleepy. Whenever we send an electrical impulse in our brain this molecule gets released. It has been found through studies of caffeine that show that coffee doesn’t actually make you more awake, it just blocks the receptors in your brain where the “tired” molecules go, preventing you from feeling like you need a rest.
   The problem with this is that the molecules are still present and will still be created. This means that as soon as the caffeine is deconstructed all the “tired” molecules will bind to the receptors at once, resulting in what we know as a “crash”.
2. Sleep is required for the information transfer from short-term to long-term memory. During REM sleep our brain transfers a lot of the information we received that day into our long-term memory and clears out some space in the short-term memory. This may not be things you learned that day but the transfer still occurs.
   It is theorized that this may be the reason our dreams awaken such interesting story-lines as the information being transferred is activated and our…