by Kimberley A. Willis

Created on: September 21, 2009   Last Updated: September 23, 2009

How sleep affects your emotions

Has anyone ever told you to get a good nights sleep and worry about it tomorrow? Have you ever said I'm so tired I want to cry? Folklore has cautioned us for hundreds of years that being tired will cause us to make bad decisions or lose control of our emotions. Now there is research to prove what many of us have known all along. Getting a good night's sleep will help you make better decisions and remain in control of your emotions.

Even in fairly recent history if a person had a nervous breakdown the public were often told they needed some rest. They probably did. Have you ever thought a problem was insurmountable, unbearable and were emotionally distraught? Then you woke up after a good night's sleep feeling more hopeful and seeing solutions to the problem. Then you have experienced how sleep, or the lack of it, affects emotion and reason.

Most mental illness also involves some sort of sleep problem. Scientists are trying to determine whether sleep problems are the cause of some emotional and mental disorders or if the disorders cause the sleep problem. Many medical problems also seem to be tied in some way to sleep deprivation. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease all seem to have a link to sleep problems. Many research projects are underway to understand these links.

Cry yourself to sleep- and feel better!

The University of California Berkley and Harvard Medical school carried out a joint experiment in which they deprived healthy adults of sleep. These subjects were kept from sleeping for about 35 hours. They then compared working MRI scans of their brains with those of another group of similar adults who received their normal amount of sleep. They focused on a primitive area of the brain called the amygdala where emotions are triggered. When they showed the volunteers emotionally disturbing pictures, this area of the brain lit up on the MRI. All of the volunteer's amygdala areas showed an emotional reaction to the pictures, but those volunteers who had been deprived of sleep had a 60% greater reaction. The amygdala area that lit up in sleep deprived volunteers was larger and brighter.

The prefrontal area of the brain controls rational thinking. In volunteers that had been deprived of sleep the circuit or connection between the amygdala, which controls emotions, and the prefrontal area, which controls reason, appeared to be greatly lessened. This means that the sleep deprived volunteers had a larger and

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