When working properly, your brain highlights the good stuff while you sleep, to keep you sane.
If you’ve ever had a difficult day followed by a poor night’s sleep only to wake up and find you’re still dealing with the same troubling emotions, you’ll agree with the following findings. A new study has found that sleep helps you process your emotions in order to keep you sane.
How does it work and why is this important to know? Here’s a look.
Sleep helps you consolidate and store your positive emotions
Researchers from the Department of Neurology at the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern have found your rapid eye movement (REM) sleep plays an important role in reinforcing your positive memories. REM sleep occurs about an hour to an hour and a half after you fall asleep. It’s during this time that you tend to have vivid dreams. Why humans have these dreams has remained a bit of a mystery but scientists have uncovered some of the reason.
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When you reach REM sleep, researchers say your brain focuses on creating memories of your positive emotions as well as your negative ones. Your brain tends to favor the positive ones, however, in order to allow you to function. If we all constantly replayed that near miss while driving on the highway, we’d likely never get behind the wheel again. It’s important to remember to stay safe, but your brain recognizes that you can’t be paralyzed by fear and live a normal life. Because of this, your neurons favor memories of safety over danger, preventing you from overreacting to emotions connected with danger. This is all important to successful survival. You want to react appropriately to dangerous things in your environment in order to stay safe. Overreacting, however, can be debilitating, and your dreams help prevent that.
REM sleep helps prevent PTSD
Researchers say that by reinforcing the positive, your brain helps to prevent excessively negative emotions that can trigger states of anxiety and lead to pathological problems. One of these is post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD). When your brain stops being able to distinguish between dangerous things and safe things, you can land you in trouble. In people who suffer from PTSD, scientists say the results of trauma are overconsolidated in their prefrontal cortex each day, over and over during REM sleep. It’s as if all the dirty laundry builds up over time with no machine to clean it.
Preventing chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and the inability to feel pleasure
Scientists say the study was enlightening and they hope it can lead the way to further discoveries. Knowing what the brain is doing while you sleep can help provide new treatments for people who suffer from PTSD, panic disorders, depression, stress, and even the inability to feel any kind of pleasure. (statistics around these disorders in the US).
Are you or someone you know suffering from PTSD? Click here to find more information and help.
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