Lack of Sleep Awakens Uncontrollable Emotions

Ever get a little testy after a bad night's R sleep? Scientists may now know why. A new study finds that a lack of sleep causes the brain's emotional centers to dramatically overreact to negative experiences.

A shutdown of the prefrontal lobe—a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control—is the reason for heightened emotional response in sleep-deprived people, said the researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley.

Reporting in the journal Current Biology, the team said its study is the first to determine, at the neural level, why lack of sleep can lead to emotionally irrational behavior and may help improve understanding of the link between sleep disruptions and psychiatric disorders.

The Research

The study included 26 healthy people who were assigned to either a normal sleep group or to a sleep deprivation group, where they were kept awake for 35 hours. Afterwards, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI was used to measure the participants' brain activity.

Results

"We had predicted a potential increase in the emotional reaction from the brain (in people deprived of sleep), but the size of the increase truly surprised us," said Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley. "The emotional centers of the brain were over 60% more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep."

He said it's almost as though lack of sleep causes the brain to revert "back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences in context and produce controlled, appropriate responses."

Implications

"This adds to the critical list of sleep's benefits," said Walker. "Sleep appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, and, in doing so, prepares us for the next day's challenges and social interactions. Most importantly, this study demonstrates the dangers of not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation fractures the brain mechanisms that regulate key aspects of our mental health."