Not getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night can activate your body's endocannabinoid (eCB) system, which increases your appetite for pleasurable but unhealthy foods, like candy and chips. "Sleep helps imprint memories or things you are studying to try and remember in the future." "Not sleeping enough at night will make it more difficult for you to learn or remember things later," says Raman Malhotra, MD, a sleep medicine physician and associate professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine. This suggests that while you sleep, memory is shifted to more efficient storage areas in the brain.Ī lack of sleep may also impair the brain's ability to flush out beta-amyloid, a toxic protein in the fluid between brain cells that has been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer's disease. Researchers found that the cerebellum, the area of the brain that controls accuracy, was more active in participants who had slept during that time period. In one small study published in the journal Neuroscience in 2005, 12 healthy college-aged participants were taught a sequence of finger movements and asked to repeat it 12 hours later as an MRI measured their brain waves. Researchers have found that just five hours of lost sleep in a 24-hour period can cut off the connection between neurons in the hippocampus, the area of the brain associated with memory. While a lack of sleep can affect your mental health, depression can also cause insomnia, leading to a vicious cycle. In addition, research has found that 65% to 90% of adults with depression have sleep problems. When the sleep deprived patients were shown negative images, they had more activity in the amygdala - the area of the brain that regulates emotions and anxiety levels - than participants who weren't sleep deprived.
This could be due to the impact that a lack of sleep has on the brain's ability to regulate emotions, which can lead to mood disturbances and negative thinking.įor example, a study published in Current Biology in 2007 examined healthy participants who were deprived of sleep for 35 hours. Non-depressed people who have insomnia may be twice as likely to develop depression than people who sleep well. In fact, people with insomnia are 17 times more likely to develop clinical anxiety than people who aren't sleep deprived. Insufficient sleep can affect your mood and increase your stress levels.
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