Brain & Heart
Effects of Lack of Sleep on Your
hijacking your mind F Insufficient sleep can significantly
reduce your ability to keep unwanted thoughts at bay, according to a study out of the U.K.
In a collaborative effort, researchers from the department of psychology at the University of York and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at University of Cam- bridge, determined that individuals who are deprived of sleep are significantly less able to stop the intrusion of negative memories than those who are well-rested. The study, published in the journal
Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that poor sleep habits and emotional dis- turbances can create a vicious cycle that exacerbates itself, highlighting the impor- tance of sleep in recovery from emotional distress.
Your Body Remembers Trauma Unpleasant thoughts and associated
physiological responses, like nervousness and sweating, may occur as the result of a triggering encounter. For example, some-
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eeling more stressed than usual? If so, getting enough sleep is essential for keeping unwanted thoughts from
one who was robbed may become uncom- fortable when they return to the scene of the crime, or a person who has experi- enced a car accident may become nervous and start to sweat when they are being driven too fast in a car. If you are confronted with a reminder
of a traumatic event, it's normal for nega- tive thoughts and feelings to arise. How- ever, an individual's ability to suppress unwanted thoughts varies greatly, along with the ability to regulate emotions once a negative thought has been triggered. Now, researchers have identified a clear association between the amount of sleep you get and your ability to stop un- pleasant thoughts and associated negative feelings, a faculty linked to mental health and overall well-being.
Memory Control Linked to Well-Being Researchers tested a hypothesis that successful memory control requires ade- quate sleep by recruiting 60 healthy young adults for the study. Participants were as- signed to either the "sleep" or "no sleep" group and asked to refrain from consuming both alcohol and caffeine for 24 hours before the experiment.
The study employed a widely used test method called the "think/no-think" (TNT) paradigm, wherein participants were asked to actively engage (think) or suppress (no-think) thoughts associated with a spe- cific visual image called a "reminder cue." Reminder cues consisted of 48 emo-
tionally neutral face images. An equal number of "target" images were selected from an international picture database, depicting both negative (a war zone) and neutral (a cityscape) scenes. Face-scene pairs were created by randomly assigning each face cue with a specific target scene. In phase one, participants provided emotional-affect rankings for scenes using a scale that ranged from a sad face with a numeric value of "1" (far-left side of scale) to a smiling face with a value of "9" (far- right of scale). Sad face/1 was used to rank scenes that made them feel completely unhappy, annoyed, unsatisfied, melancholic, de- spaired or bored. Smiling face/9 was for scenes that made them feel completely happy, pleased, satisfied, contented and hopeful. Participants completed two emotion- ranking sessions that were divided by an
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