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Sleep does not help insomniacs to shed emotional distress
While emotional stress can reduce after a good sleep for a few people, people with insomnia do not benefit from it, finds a study conducted at the NetherlandsĀ Institute of Neurosciences.
Chennai
According to the study published in the journal Brain, insomnia can increase the emotional distress and disturbs the regulation of emotions. Psychiatrists said that insomnia can affect the memory circuits in the brain and worsen the emotional distress.
The researchers examined the brain activity people with and without insomnia through MRI scans and the findings revealed that emotional circuits in the brain of an individual fail to disengage in people with insomnia. The people with old embarrassing moments had an overlap of circuits in the parts of the brain that were responsible for emotional and cognitive processing.
The author of the study, Rick Wassing said that sleep does not help alleviate emotional distress in people with insomnia, while their restless nights can even make them feel worse.
The parts of the brain that helps regulate emotion, also has an important role in insomnia. People who suffer from insomnia do not have their brains circuits activated correctly during rapid eye movement sleep due to improper sleep. This stops the brain from disengaging emotional circuits from the memories of distant distressing events. āBrain research now shows that only good sleepersā profit from sleep when it comes to shedding emotional tension.ā
According to psychiatrists, experiencing difficulty in falling asleep isĀ not the only symptomĀ of insomnia. Other symptoms such as moodiness, concentration loss, a lack of energy in the daytime, irritability and struggling to focus on work may also occur due to insomnia.
Dr Vivian Kapil, a psychiatrist at the SIMS Hospital, said that sleep is very much essential for consolidation of memory, smart forgetting which is systematic elimination of irrelevant memory traces and synaptic plasticity. Insomnia when persistent and untreated can lead to shrinking or disappearance of neuronal connections in the brain which can affect an individualās attention, working memory, mood regulation, ability to learn, remember and assess risks. Consolidation of newly encoded memory into long term memory happens duringsleep and when there is insomnia these processes become disrupted, he said.
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