The Secret Life Of The Brain While You Sleep

Throughout my professional career, many are the inquiries that I have received from families distressed by the dream of their children. All these families told me about the enormous difficulties they encountered in getting their little ones to go to bed.

In these cases, I am not referring to babies or young children, but to those who, from the age of 6 or 7, refuse to go to bed because they consider that sleeping is a waste of time. Many of these children claim that sleeping is useless and use all their strength to stay awake. In the end, the hour of sleep turns daily, for the whole family, into a moment of disagreement and tension.

When they arrive at the consultation, to begin to address this issue, I always start by explaining to the whole family, both adults and children, what happens in our brain while we sleep. In this way, everyone understands the benefits of getting adequate rest.

For children, I use the simile of imagining our mind as a huge library that stores all the experiences, emotions, sensations and learning that we accumulate throughout life. Every day, during the hours we are awake, the librarian (or librarian, depending on whether she is a boy or a girl) receives new material.

At night, the librarian is dedicated to using all this information that he has collected to organize everything and put each book in its place. In this way, users who arrive in the morning will find a clean and up-to-date library. This is the work our brain does at night, which is why sleep is so necessary.

Sleep is as essential to life as eating or drinking, not in vain, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Nature would not have made us evolve to the point of sleeping 8 hours a day (as an estimated average) if sleep weren’t essential for us.

In fact, it is so important to our physical and mental health that one torture practiced by dictatorial regimes is sleep deprivation (using powerful spotlights and loud music), since it has been proven that not sleeping for several days can cause serious mental and physical disorders, and can even cause death.

What our brain does while we sleep

The hours of sleep represent a renewal for our body on a physical, mental and emotional level. In the past, it was believed that the brain “shut down” during the night, but for just over a century, we have known that, even if we are not aware of it, when we sleep, our brain continues to work actively.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the tasks our brain performs while we sleep:

1. Brain cleansing. During the day, the activity of neurons produces waste substances that accumulate in the brain. When we sleep, the brain is responsible for cleaning all the stored waste and prepares to face the new day completely renewed. If we don’t get enough sleep, we accumulate these substances that, in the long run, become toxic to our brain.
2. Promotes creativity

. While we dream, the brain is dedicated to delving into the problems and concerns that we have in waking life. He does this work in a different way, much more imaginative and creative, than he does when we are conscious. It makes sense, then, the advice of our grandparents to “consult with the pillow” the doubts or concerns that we have. Maybe after a night’s sleep, we wake up with the solution.

3. Emotional activity and empathy. Some researchers believe that while we dream, we train countless situations with a wide range of emotions. This would favor empathy, connection with others and, ultimately, social cohesion.
4. Process, order and save the information. Everything experienced during the day is stored in a kind of temporary memory (hippocampus). At night, the brain processes all this information and stores everything that can be useful to us in a more permanent memory that, in turn, will be the base to establish new learnings the next day.

The case of Marcos

The way in which Marcos, an 11-year-old boy, recognized and applied everything he learned about sleep in the sessions we had is very nice and instructive. Marcos was a kid who was fond of video game consoles who didn’t want to go to bed so he could continue playing (during the summer holidays).

One day he related to me that he had made a surprising discovery. If he was tired and found a particularly difficult moment in a game, it was impossible for him to get over it. However, if he went to sleep and resumed the game the next morning, he managed to get past the screen in a few tries.

In consultation, he told me: “Sure, I understand. At night, my brain practices and finds the best way to kill the bad guy. “

The joy for his parents was that, during the school year, Marcos, an extremely creative and intelligent child, decided on his own to try using this same technique ( sleeping to consolidate learning ) to study and face exams. In this way, in addition to being more rested, compared to the previous year, his grades improved considerably.