Understanding the Connection Between Sleep and Anxiety

The Society for Neuroscience’s annual conference, Neuroscience 2018, was held in San Diego, California, and included research findings demonstrating a relationship between sleep deprivation and anxiety. However, the news isn’t all bad this year’s conference included some science-based optimism as well as some cause for alarm.

Despite its media ubiquity, neuroscience continues to focus on the mysteries of sleep not only the dangers of not getting enough but also the long list of critical functions it performs in our brains.

The research presented at this year’s conference covered a wide variety of topics, including the role of sleep in memory consolidation and trash elimination in brain tissue.

Sleep, especially well-placed naps, aids the brain’s consolidation of knowledge, transferring memory freight from short-term to long-term storage and sharpening its accessibility for when we need it, according to more studies every year. Memory is impossible to achieve without sleep.

We’ve also discovered that sleep gives the brain a crucial interval for moving poisons out of neural tissue via a complicated garbage-removal system.

The brain’s trash-disposal machinery, which operates independently of the body’s lymphatic system, appears to be sleep-dependent. Sleep deprivation is a possible cause of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, which are linked to the buildup of poisons in brain tissue.

Get academic writing on the topic by clicking here. Read more academic topics by clicking here.