The Best Time To Wake Up To Improve Your Memory, From a Neuroscientist

We all need to sleep, but very few of us actually get enough of it. Whether it's due to problems falling asleep or staying asleep, not getting enough could actually be affecting our memory.

One in three adults has trouble getting enough sleep each night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The best time to wake up is after you had a full night's sleep. There's no cutting around it, we need seven to eight hours of sleep. If you wake up and you are sleep deprived your memory is going to suffer," neuroscientist and best-selling author Friederike Fabritius told Newsweek.

How Does Sleep Affect Memory?

Rapid eyelid movement sleep, also known as REM sleep, is the phase of sleep when dreams can occur. It plays an important role in memory, emotional processing, and healthy brain development, according to Fabritius.

"It's quite interesting because researchers found that during sleep the brain transfers information from short-term memory to long-term memory," she said. "So sleep is essential for memory formation. Without sleep, we have a hard time forming memories."

Researchers discovered this during one study involving rats. They had forgotten to remove the electrodes from the animals while they were sleeping and found that the rats demonstrated the same patterns of brain activity they exhibited the day before—but backward, according to Fabritius.

"This is how researchers at MIT discovered the specific impact that sleep has on forming memory," she said.

Sleep almost acts like a washing machine for your brain, removing toxins and stress hormones meaning that when stressed, a "good night's sleep" can have a calming effect.

"Sleep is also the time when the brain has time to repair and produce new neurotransmitters. We really need it in order to clean our brains and to remove toxins and also negative emotions," said Fabritius. Without proper sleep, our memories cannot be properly formed.

"I always tell people that rather than staying up late to study, it's better to study less and sleep more," she said, "Because then the few things you did manage to study will actually stay in your brain. It's useless to stay up and not sleep, as you won't remember anything."

Around 20 percent of students pull all-nighters at least once a month, and about 35 percent stay up past three in the morning once or more weekly, according to Medical News Today. When we sleep, our short-term memories are transferred into long-term memories and negative stress hormones are removed.

"From a brain perspective, memory is information that has been transferred from the hippocampus to long-term memory and it's spread in associative networks throughout your brain and sorted by similar things/experiences that go together," said Fabritius.

"There are different types of memory. To give you some examples: There's episodic memory, which helps you to remember certain life events, and then there's working memory, which helps you to process things while you learn them. Memory is spread out into different systems in your brain."

Why Is Memory Important?

Happy memories are a huge source of comfort in difficult times, but the memory serves a much more important function, it keeps us safe. If we can't learn and remember what is good for us, or bad, then we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again, both physical and emotional.

"Memory is really important for us in order to survive as a species and the people who have a good memory tend to do better in life because it's so fundamental to all areas of life such as academic success and even your relationships," said Fabritius.

Mood and happiness can have a huge impact on our ability to remember things. When we're stressed, our sleep can become interrupted, therefore affecting our memory. Ever been stressed out and unable to remember someone's name?

"In order to improve your memory, you should try to get yourself into a positive mood because mood directly impacts memory formation, Fabritius advises. "Of course, people also learn a lot when they have strong negative emotions, but that has an overall negative impact on the brain and is highly unethical.

"So you should try to avoid learning with negative emotions but rather positive ones. Negative emotions are only effective when they are used for health and safety such as learning not to touch the fire because you will burn yourself."

As we age, our ability to form new memories worsens, but our long-term memory is still strong.

"Our brains become less flexible, we have a bit less neuroplasticity as we age and so our memory is negatively impacted," Fabritius said. "There are things we can do to remedy this, however, such as dancing, which has been shown to be twice as effective as reading in helping people age better."

Social ballroom dancing can improve cognitive functions and reduce brain atrophy in older adults who are at increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, according to a 2022 study published in Journal of Ageing and Physical Activity. The study enrolled 25 adults over 65 years old who did not have dementia, in six months of twice-weekly ballroom dancing, or treadmill walking classes.

Dementia tests showed that the group that danced improved their executive functioning—an umbrella term for planning, reasoning and processing tasks that require attention.

When Is the Best Time to Wake Up to Improve Memory?

"After a good night's sleep and at roughly the same time every day!" said Fabritius. "Studies show that people who go to bed late and get up late don't tend to function as highly as those who go to bed earlier and get up earlier. Adopting a schedule and sticking to it as closely as possible seems to work best."

Starting your day with light exercise has been shown to improve brain functionality, releasing dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter and a hormone important for memory and cognitive function.

"So," Fabritius said, "to keep your memory skills strong while you sleep, get moving, stay organized, and try not to sweat the small stuff."

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