Goodnight. I Won't Sleep.

According to Maria Konnikova on her New York Times article “Goodnight. Sleep Clean.” sleep is the time during which our brain cleans out all the trash we accumulate in there on a daily basis. Even though it has always been ingrained in my brain (mostly by overly preoccupied parents) that sleep is essential to my well being, I had never thought about it in terms as drastic as the ones presented in this op-ed article. For a girl who sleeps an average of three hours a night, this article doesn’t promise any good. It actually sort of implies a high risk of suffering Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s… lovely.

“… there is a buildup of the types of proteins…normally [cleared] out during regular sleep, like beta-amyloids and tau, both associated with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia,” states Konnikova in her analysis of the new scientific discovery scientists have called the glymphatic system (the lymphatic system of the brain so to speak). This system consists of a liquid that literally cleans your brain and prepares it for another day full of trash intake.

If this is in fact true, my brain must be fuller than a dumpster. My sleeping pattern went off to war at some point between middle school and high school and it hasn’t come back ever since. Now, the issue is not that I don’t like sleeping per-se, the feeling of falling asleep is nice enough and the nothingness that fills you while you sleep is even better. It is the time I could be spending doing something productive that bothers me. I don’t like sleeping because there is literally no point in it for my life (other than survival).

Despite the idea Konnikova presents (the whole you-must-sleep-or-your-brain-will-slowly-become-contaminated-until-you-have-serious-repercussions deal) I basically live by the ideeology presented in the first sentence of her article: “SLEEP seems like a perfectly fine waste of time.” It doesn’t seem fair to my brain that I am expecting it to function without giving it time to fully recuperate after a day of trash storage, but then again school expects me to function AND remember the trash so my brain must be able to do it right?

If time needs to be wasted I’d rather do it on Tumblr. 

Actual full image: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj6va6Dnwa1qeablwo1_250.png