Sleep helps your body detoxify. Here’s how you do it.

It’s no secret that the better we sleep the better we feel. But a lack of sleep can make us feel grouchy and run down. Once that happens, our problem-solving skills decrease, reasoning becomes impaired, and attention to detail is lost.

So the aim of this article is to first help you appreciate the value of your sleep and then show you ways to improve it.

Let’s go take a look under the hood.

The body has been using sleep to recharge and repair itself since the day we were born. Sleep also plays a huge role in detoxification. And yet, so many of us fight the idea of going to bed at a reasonable time.

Straight out of the gate you should know that your brain is a big fat energy hog. Even though it makes up just two percent of your body’s weight, the brain gobbles up a whopping twenty percent of your daily energy intake! At night as our brain sleeps something quite remarkable happens. A cleanup crew moves in and begins washing the brain cerebrospinal fluid. No really, it’s true.

Cerebrospinal fluid is a clear liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It sweeps through the brain along a series of channels that surround blood vessels. This process is managed by the brain’s glial cells. Hence, science has recently defined this as the “glymphatic system.”