NEW Glymphatic Science: Exercise Boosts Your Brain’s Nightly Clean – HERE’S MY ROUTINE
DEFRANKSIn a weird twist of evolutionary fate, your brain doesn’t have a lymphatic system, aka that vast network of vessels and nodes that collects and removes cellular crap throughout the rest of your body.
Which yes, means every other organ gets an elaborate plumbing network to haul out the trash, while the brain gets a front-row seat, bathing in its own neurotoxic garbage.
That is, until 2012, when a research team in New York saw something nobody had seen before. During sleep, cerebrospinal fluid rides in along the arteries, gets pushed through brain tissue via little water channels, and flushes back out along the veins carrying metabolic waste with it. Officially entering the brain into the detoxification game via the newly coined glymphatic system. With a couple of caveats, that is.
First, that this system runs mostly during deep, slow-wave sleep, operating at a fraction of its capacity while you’re awake. And second, just as demand for brain cleaning goes up as we age, we tend to get less deep sleep — and therefore less glymphatic time. Not cool, I know!
But that problem may have just gotten some hope. New glymphatic data hit the scientific streets showing how exercise may preserve and even strengthen this system throughout life.
You heard that right, exercise strikes again. Here’s what you need to know….
