Your brain is the most metabolically active organ in your body. All day, it burns energy and produces waste misfold proteins, toxic byproducts. Unlike the rest of your body, it has no lymphatic system to carry that debris away.
In 2013, neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard and her team made a landmark discovery: the brain has its own rinsing system the glymphatic system and it almost exclusively runs at night**.** During deep, slow-wave sleep, brain cells physically shrink by up to 60%, opening wider channels for cerebrospinal fluid to surge through and flush out accumulated waste. The pump driving it all? Slow, rhythmic pulses of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.
Among the waste it clears: amyloid-beta and tau, the exact proteins that form the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease. 
A 2022 systematic review of nearly 20,000 participants found consistent links between poor sleep and higher concentrations of both proteins in the brain.
Miss deep sleep consistently, and the garbage accumulates.
MBH/PS