A couple of new reports came out this week addressing sleep
in our culture. Everyone knows that they feel a little
cranky when they don’t get enough sleep. It’s
therefore no surprise that sleep affects your mood. What
may be surprising, though, is that scientists know very
little about why that’s true.
We understand quite a bit about why sleep disrupts your
immune function, your metabolism and your ability to learn
and remember things. I have discussed each of these in past
articles. But we don’t know much about how sleep
regulates mood. An interesting new study published in
Current Biology by Michael Walker, sheds some light on this
subject.
A loss of reason
A complex brain circuit that involves both higher thinking
centers and reactive centers controls your emotions.
It’s the higher thinking centers that separate us
from other animals. We have the ability (although we
don’t always use it) to evaluate our responses
thoughtfully, before just reacting impulsively.
In the new study, volunteers were either deprived of a good
night’s sleep or allowed to sleep normally.
Researchers then looked at both their higher thinking and
their reactive brain centers after presenting them with
some emotionally negative images to stir their reactions.
They found that specific reactive centers of the brain
acted the same whether or not the volunteers had slept well
the night before. But certain higher thinking centers
responsible for keeping those reaction centers under
control, were much less active in the sleep deprived group.
The interpretation of this is that our ‘gut
reactions’ are not really that affected by lack of
sleep (at least in this situation) but our ability to
reason and monitor those reactions is weakened, which can
have all kinds of downstream consequences.
Is a longer workday productive?
Why is this important? Other studies show that we are
getting far less sleep today than we did a century ago and
throughout history. The advent of artificial light has
extended the length of our daily
‘productivity’, but many argue that this is
actually counter-productive. By not getting optimal sleep,
we are decreasing our ability to function efficiently the
next day, and actually getting less done.
In fact, another study just released shows exactly that. In
this one, researchers, Patricia Murphy and Scott Campbell,
showed that napping is actually productive. First of all,
midday napping did not cause people to sleep less well at
night, as many believe. Second, midday napping improved
performance on math, decision-making and reaction-time
tests. This increased performance was true after the nap
and lasted all the way into the next day, following the nap.
Many of us are so busy that we steal hours from our sleep
to attempt to get more done. But science argues that we are
not getting more done this way. We are actually reducing
our ability to be creative, make decisions, work
efficiently and cooperate with other people. Perhaps a
little more time invested in our rest could dramatically
improve our career and personal relationships.
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