Here’s why you get grumpy after a bad night’s sleep

November 14th, 2007 - 2:43 am ICT by admin  
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.


“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.


“The emotional centers of the brain were over 60 percent more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep,” Walker said.he 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. alker said that the study findings lay the groundwork for further investigation into the relationship between sleep and psychiatric illnesses.

“This is the first set of experiments that demonstrate that even healthy people’s brains mimic certain pathological psychiatric patterns when deprived of sleep. Before, it was difficult to separate out the effect of sleep versus the disease itself. Now we’re closer to being able to look into whether the person has a psychiatric disease or a sleep disorder,” he said.

The study is published in the Oct. 22 issue of the journal Current Biology. (ANI)

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