A very common attitude is making you less intelligent and happy, you know?

We have already reported here at Mega Curioso the results of a recent survey that calculated the ideal amount of sleep based on various age groups, remember? Basically, if you are between 14 and 17 years old, the ideal is to sleep between eight and ten hours a day; now, if you have between 18 and 25, seven hours of sleep will help, but that time can extend to nine hours - check out the full list here.

Now let's be honest: in 2015, when we live with our smartphones in hand all the time, when Netflix decides to create fantastic series - now we'll even have a Brazilian production! - when MasterChef ends so late and when we seem to live in an era dominated by incredible cafes, sleep seems to have fallen into the background.

The problem is that most people think that getting too little sleep is a sign of productivity when, in fact, lack of optimal sleep time can hurt our mental health far more than we realize. A recent survey even states that little sleep lowers our IQ Time columnist Eric Barker has exposed an easy-to-understand comparison: "Losing an hour's sleep turns a sixth grade brain into a fourth grade brain."

And now Jose?

"If you screamed / if you moaned / if you touched / the Viennese waltz / if you slept / if you tired / if you died ... / But you don't die / You're hard, Joseph, " say a few lines from Carlos Drummond de Andrade. “If you slept, ” wrote the poet as he remembered the importance of a well-slept night.

It is not today that lack of sleep seems to be related to restless, disturbed, creative, or over-accelerated minds. Technology, however, soon tried to bring more people into this group of uncontrollable insomniacs. And, after all, just an hour's less sleep a night seems to be enough to cause us some trouble.

“Losing one hour of sleep is equivalent to losing two years of cognitive and developmental maturity, ” explains the publication. In the case of adolescents, those who get the highest grades also seem to be those who sleep an average of 15 minutes longer than those who have average grades.

To reach these results, researchers evaluated the sleep quality and grades of more than 3, 000 high school equivalents in Rhode Island. And the conclusion is simple: even 15 extra minutes of sleep already makes a difference.

It's not just a matter of intelligence

Researchers also found that lack of sleep affects our ability to control impulses. Sleep seems little to impair our biological ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Since this is a mechanism that gives us energy, just add the dots to understand why we feel tired after a bad night's sleep.

This lack of energy further affects the brain region known as the prefrontal cortex, responsible for the so-called “executive function”. These include our ability to organize thoughts when it comes to achieving new goals, predicting outcomes, and realizing the consequences of our actions.

This is why people who have a poor quality of sleep are also often more impulsive and, in that sense, impulsiveness causes them to drop their commitments in exchange for more pleasurable activities that involve some form of entertainment. If that seems to finally explain your life, it's good to be smart and leave the Netflix marathon just for the weekends.

Another feature of a tired brain is the feeling that one is stuck in a bad situation without the ability to find any creative solution to solve everyday problems. Do you know that one person can't have the same attitudes and expect different results? Yeah. This is the logic of a tired brain: to do the same thing, even when you know the answer will be negative.

It's a matter of happiness too

Do you know what your exhausted brain does to you, besides misleading you and turning you into an impulsive person? It will also fill your head with negative memories. Slutty, right? But it's true and it makes sense. It's basically like this: tired minds are not happy and, lacking a concrete reason for dissatisfaction, your head has a way of remembering bad times.

These negative stimuli are processed in the brain region of the amygdala, while the hippocampus processes what is positive or neutral. Guess what lack of sleep does? Exactly that: it overloads the hippocampus and affects the amygdala more lightly.

As a result, the sleeper ends up having memories of negative experiences more often, so these bad thoughts undermine our present experiences.

In an experiment to prove this theory, a group of teenage students tried to memorize a word list. Those words with a negative connotation like "cancer" were remembered 81% of the time. This percentage dropped to 31 for positive and neutral words like "basketball" or "sunlight." Yeah ... Apparently science is right and it doesn't hurt us to try to get some more sleep.