Ever wondered why you feel grumpy after a bad night’s sleep? Well, researchers from University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School have resolved the mystery, by discovering that a lack of sleep causes the brain's emotional centers to significantly overreact to negative experiences.
In the first neural investigation into what happens to the emotional brain without sleep, results from the brain imaging study suggest that while a good night's rest can regulate your mood and help you cope with the next day's emotional challenges, sleep deprivation does the opposite by excessively boosting the part of the brain most closely connected to depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.
"It's almost as though, without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity, in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses," said Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and senior author of the study.
"Emotionally, you're not on a level playing field," he added.
Walker and his team found that the reason behind the phenomenon is the amygdala, the region of the brain that alerts the body to protect itself in times of danger. Walker said that amygdala goes into overdrive on no sleep, consequently shuting down the prefrontal cortex, which commands logical reasoning, and thus preventing the release of chemicals needed to pacify the fight-or-flight reflex.