It is no secret that pulling an all-nighter is a bad idea. It impairs cognitive function, increases anxiety symptoms and decreases alertness. As it turns out, there’s another reason you should avoid it: it ages your brain.
According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, a single night of sleep deprivation can change your brain and make it appear older. Typical brain aging includes structural and functional changes that deplete cognition over time. The last thing you want to do is speed up that process. Here’s what to know.
Sleep deprivation is aging your brain
Sleep is an essential time for our body to heal and recover from the day. Our brains do the same thing. Memory consolidation, clearing toxins and creating new neural pathways only happen while we sleep. If you don’t get adequate sleep, your brain won’t have enough time to carry out vital functions, which impairs cognitive function.
Most studies investigate performance on cognitive tests; this one investigates the age of the brain structures with MRIs. Participants included 134 healthy volunteers aged 19 to 39 with a mean age of 25.3.
During the study, four sleep conditions were measured: Total sleep deprivation (no sleep), partial sleep deprivation (three hours of sleep) and chronic deprivation (five hours of sleep for five days in a row) and the control group (eight hours of sleep).
Out of the four groups, only the total sleep deprivation group was found to consistently have an increased brain age of one to two years after a single night of sleep deprivation. Brain age wasn’t significantly changed in the other groups. Additionally, a full night’s sleep reverses the aging effects on the brain.
There are limitations to this study regarding the age of participants and the duration of the study. So we must take the results with a grain of salt that more research is needed to investigate the long-term effects of sleep deprivation in different age groups and sleep habits.