How can sleep help control obesity? Can sleep improve your memory?    According to "Nuture Shock: New Thinking about children", by Po bronson and Ashley Merryman", it can both help you remember better and it can also help you control obesity.   Sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the hormone that suppresses your appetite. So less sleep correlates into a desire to want to eat. So if you want to control your weight squash your appetite by getting more sleep! Tired children have trouble retaining learning.  Children awakened at dawn to go to school are still releasing "melatonin" which makes them sleepy. When sleepy your brain cannot make the necessary connections in your brain to encode memory.  The more you learn during the day the more sleep you need that night to save what you learned.  Sleep is kind of like your "save" key on your computer.  If you don't hit "save" or get adequate sleep the information will not be there when you try to retrieve it.    More Info