Austin Bryan's Dropblog — For years, poor sleep has been linked to a host of...

For years, poor sleep has been linked to a host of medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, mood disorders and even alcohol dependency. Now a new study published in SLEEP suggests there may be an even bigger problem to worry about: a shrinking and weakening brain.

The study, conducted by researchers from Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, focused on a group of 66 Chinese adults. Every two years, the participants were asked to take a sleep questionnaire, as well as MRI scans and neuropsychological assessments. The result: People who had trouble sleeping had “greater age-related brain atrophy and cognitive decline” than those who rested well every night.

Not getting enough sleep will cost your brain dearly (via micdotcom)

And yet we still lionize those who sleep under their desks.

There are a few people whom I end up respecting for this behavior, because they can’t help cramming in a few extra hours of super-weird thinking time to work out the stuff they’re working through.

For most of us, however, the “late to bed, early to rise, grinding it out” startup mentality is just pretty fucking stupid.

Unless you’re a genetic anomaly [and you’re probably not, no matter how “used to” five or six hours of sleep a night you are], you are achieving less than you could because you’re sleep deprived.

(via whitneymcn)