Lack
of sleep can affect several systems in the body. There is a lot of evidence on
it’s effect on immune regulation, metabolic control, and neurocognitive
processes such as learning and memory. However, evidence is lacking on it’s
role in regulating the emotional brain state. There is clinical evidence to
suggest the sleep and emotion interact, especially since nearly all psychiatric
and neurological disorders express sleep disruption in some way. Aside from
sleep, there is a lot of knowledge on how emotion is regulated. The amygdala
has a huge role in processing emotional information and the medial-prefrontal
cortex (MPFC) is thought to exhibit an inhibitory, top-down control of the amygdala
which results in appropriate emotional responses.
Using
a sleep-deprivation group and a control group, this experiment ran several scan
on the participants while performing an emotional stimulus viewing test. The
test used stimuli that ranged along a gradient from emotionally neutral to more
aversive images. The recorded observation show that the amygdala expressed
significant activation to the increasingly negative stimuli, however the
sleep-deprived group exhibited a +60% greater magnitude of activation. Similar
reactions were seen in both groups in response to the neutral stimuli, but a
huge difference in activation could be seen increasing amounts dependent on the
strength of the stimuli. This led to implications that there can be definite
relationships between sleep disturbances and mood disorders.
My
interest from this article came from the work I do with the Health Educational
Awareness Team (HEAT) on campus. My favorite workshop to teach is Sleep and
Relaxation because there is a lot of relevant and really interesting information
presented that most people don’t typically learn about. There is this one
section that we present on that is specifically geared towards sleep and its
effect on the emotional brain. A 60 Minutes segment is shown in order to solidify
the information, and the information provided matches almost exactly with what
this article presented. The role and activation of the amygdala in response to
certain stimuli is largely uncontrolled in sleep-deprived individuals. This can
often be why people are cranky, or younger children throw tantrums when they
are exhausted. However, I find this particularly interesting due to its effects
on mental health; especially for the college aged population. There’s this
large push or thought process that sleep may not be that important, but I think
if we are able to show people that it may really help control or slow the onset
of depression, anxiety or other disorders, more people will pay attention to
its benefits.
I find it quite interesting that despite most college age students having access to information that proves the importance of sleep and the positive impact it can have on all areas of ones life, many college students still devalue it and don't see it as something that is necessary and rather as something that can be sacrificed. I believe this is a cause for pondering upon and evaluation the emphasis our culture puts on particular things over others. For example, students are expected to push themselves to achieve more and more- from academics to extracurricular activities that set them apart, all the while maintaining a job to provide for themselves. When a social life also is placed in this ring, it is easy to see how sleep loses its priority. Maybe a cultural shift is necessary so that we can apply our neurological and psychological learnings to positively shift our values and societal behavior for the overall betterment and increase in quality of life.
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