Hello, my lovely people
How are you doing this Sunday?
Top 2 insights from this newsletter:
1️⃣ When we don’t get sleep, we don’t process well the emotions from the previous days
2️⃣ We start acting on raw emotions, like a child throwing a tantrum, because of poor communication between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.
It’s Sunday night, and you have finally made it to bed, drifting asleep slowly into that sweet, heartwarming, cosy position in your bed. There is no better feeling than that. But for some reason, you can’t get yourself to fall asleep. You turn and toss till your partner gets annoyed at you while you increasingly get annoyed at yourself. The following day, you barely clocked any sleep and woke up grumpy and somehow disappointed with life. I hope this doesn’t happen tonight.
What happens to your brain?
There seem to be two ways in which bad sleep affects our ability to control emotions:
1. Accumulating emotional luggage (literally)
The amygdala, the brain's emotional processor, becomes active during REM sleep. It processes the emotional memories of the day to store them for long-term memory.
The difference between the first time you give a scary presentation in front of your boss and the 10th time you do it will be down to your processing that experience and its emotional load. The 10th time you do it, it will just feel like part of your regular routine, despite this giving you horrible anxiety just 3 months ago. The amygdala and other brain parts have had the time to process those emotions, categorise them and decide: giving this presentation is not life-threatening, and we don’t need to overreact when it happens. They will store this so that when it happens again, you have a file record of how you are meant to feel in this situation.
When we don’t sleep, these emotional memories don’t get processed. They start piling up and show up the next day. You are carrying the emotional luggage from the day before.
2. Unable to calm your inner child
The Amygdala is the raw processor of emotions. It feels fear and intense emotions, which is what keeps us alive in life-threatening situations. However, the Prefrontal Cortex decides if the feeling the amygdala is producing is worth acting on.
The amygdala might still feel a bit nervous the 10th time you give that presentation, but the Prefrontal Cortex will remind it that we’ve done this before, so there is nothing to worry about. It then decides whether to act on what the Amygdala is saying.
A lack of sleep causes the amygdala to not communicate with the prefrontal cortex, leading us to act out on everything the amygdala says. We start acting like the child throwing a tantrum in the middle of the supermarket because he didn’t get the sweets he wanted. Familiar feeling?
If you bring these two things together: piled-up emotions plus poor communication, it can only end up one way: snapping at everyone and everything.
The fix:
Get sleep. It's easier said than done for some of us. I know.
In the next newsletter, we will discuss how poor sleep affects our metabolism and weight.
See you next Sunday
Francesca
References
Fernandez, R. C., Moore, V. M., Van Ryswyk, E. M., Varcoe, T. J., Rodgers, R. J., March, W. A., Moran, L. J., Avery, J. C., McEvoy, R. D., & Davies, M. J. (2018). Sleep disturbances in women with polycystic ovary syndrome: prevalence, pathophysiology, impact and management strategies. Nature and Science of Sleep, 10, 45–64. https://doi.org/10.2147/NSS.S127475
Hung, J.-H., Hu, L.-Y., Tsai, S.-J., Yang, A. C., Huang, M.-W., Chen, P.-M., Wang, S.-L., Lu, T., & Shen, C.-C. (2014). Risk of psychiatric disorders following polycystic ovary syndrome: a nationwide population-based cohort study. PloS One, 9(5), e97041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097041
Johnson, D. A., Billings, M. E., & Hale, L. (2018). Environmental determinants of insufficient sleep and sleep disorders: Implications for population health. Current Epidemiology Reports, 5(2), 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40471-018-0139-y
Saghir, Z., Syeda, J. N., Muhammad, A. S., & Balla Abdalla, T. H. (2018). The amygdala, sleep debt, sleep deprivation, and the emotion of anger: A possible connection? Cureus, 10(7), e2912. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.2912
Walker, M. (2018). Why we sleep: The new science of sleep and dreams. Penguin Books.
Disclaimer: We are all unique in our ways, so this information is for educational purposes only. In my communications, I summarise research data and bring my experience. This shouldn’t be viewed as medical advice at any point. Please consult your healthcare provider further about your health needs.