3. You need to connect the creative dots

A 2007 sleep study found that your mind can make connections while you sleep that it can’t make when you’re awake. People are much more likely to connect the dots between unrelated ideas after waking up from a good night’s sleep.

4. You have important decisions to make

You owe your brain a big ‘thank you’, because while you get to check-out from reality, it’s doing all the dirty work. During sleep, the brain processes complex stimuli and then uses it to make decisions when you’re awake.

Have you ever woken yourself up by trying to act out something that you repeatedly do during the day? Even when dreaming, your brain continues to prepare you to make proper decisions and respond to your environment.

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5. There’s too much stuff you need to remember!

Your brain is, essentially, a computer full of files. While you’re drooling on your pillow, it’s making new memories, consolidating old ones, and linking them together – or storing them in the appropriate files.

The part of your brain that helps to make and combine memories (your hippocampus) can be poorly affected without enough rest because it can’t lock away all the new things you’ve learned throughout the day. If you’re planning on staying up all night so you can memorize the digits of Pi, you’ll successfully achieve official nerd status but likely forget 40% of the numbers you learned.

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Going to sleep is like clicking the refresh button in your web browser – if you don’t have it, you can be blocked from downloading your own information. We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping, but that’s not enough, dammit!

The Japanese clearly had the right idea when they started encouraging power naps at work.

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