Gary Brecka

The sleep choices you're making right now will determine your brain's health in your 70s and your 80s.

I know it may seem hard to think about the effects decades from now, but we can even bring these effects into the present.

Research on college students shows that even young, healthy brains are immediately impacted by sleep disruption.

I'm sure everyone listening remembers staying up late, studying the night before a test in high school or college, and then just not doing as well on the test as you had hoped.

Research shows that this is a real thing.

Students with poor sleep quality showed 15% lower performance on memory tests compared to those who slept well.

But attention takes an even bigger hit.

Just one night of fragmented sleep, not even total sleep deprivation, just disrupted sleep, reduces attention span capacity by 30%.

That's nearly a third of your ability to focus gone after just one night.

Here's where we run into a problem.

Modern life has hijacked almost every factor that supports quality sleep.

We've got artificial light flooding our homes until late at night, disrupting the natural circadian signals that tell our bodies it's time to wind down.

We've got screens emitting blue light directly into our eyes right before bed, suppressing melatonin production.

We've got caffeine consumption extending later and later into the day.

We've got work emails and stress following us into the bedroom.

And we've got cultural narrative that treats sleep like a luxury rather than a necessity.

The obsession with productivity in our culture tells us that sleeping less means getting more done.

Sleep when you're dead, right?

But the research shows the exact opposite is true.

It's not surprising at all that sleep restriction makes you less productive, not more.