Poor-quality sleep may heighten behaviors including hyperactivity, compulsions, and aggressiveness, reports Scientific American.

When Nick was a toddler, he struggled to make sense of language, coordinate his own limbs and orient himself in the world. His mother, Brigid Day, got some sympathetic advice from his neurologist. It was permission, essentially, to soothe her child into sleep by lying next to him in bed. “His pediatric neurologist even said, ‘That is something you can do to make his life calm and easy for him when a lot of things are hard,’” Day says.