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• #Sleepless problem how to#

Essentially, the brain is saying, "I think I can help you."

The brain uses these memory "tags" as indicators that the event was important and that there's more to figure out. It's picking out what has some "affective buzz," the emotions that happened during or shortly after something took place.

#Sleepless problem how to#

But there are usually too many items, and you don't know how to sufficiently rate the importance of each one, so "it doesn't help you," Stickgold says.īut when you get into bed, the brain does a triage and "rifles through the events of the day and sees what's left unfinished," he says. When you're awake and trying to work through a sticky problem, the go-to approach is often taking a piece of paper and listing the pluses and minuses. How the brain solves problems during sleep The first step is understanding how it works. It can feel like a stress, but rather than fight it, there are ways to accept the nightly review of the day so it doesn't turn into a sleepless assessment of our entire lives.

The brain is doing its nighttime job of finding connections, so when we wake up, we have a different take. Robert Stickgold, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. We certainly don't want to wait until tomorrow. This advice, often given by a parent, is said with love and good intentions, but it still makes us roll our eyes, because we just want to go to sleep - not think, not assess options.