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IIn the last few minutes before sleeping, the mistakes of the day creep into the margins of the imagination. Even good sleepers will feel their stomachs contract when they are reminded of an embarrbading moment during the day. But the new research published Thursday in Brain reveals that insomniacs feel this pain even more acute. Memories from a distant past haunt them continually during the evening, keeping them awake, as shown by an embarrbading karaoke experience.
In his article, Eus van Someren, Ph.D., director of the Department of Sleep and Cognition at the Dutch Institute of Neuroscience, presents evidence of a link between emotional experiences and insomnia. With the help of a combination of stress badysis, brain imaging and an embarrbading karaoke experience, he argues that insomniacs experience emotional distress different from people who sleep well. This extra level of distress, he says reversethen pushes them into a vicious cycle of anxiety and insomnia:
.. we feel that if you are not good at shaking off emotional tension, you are more likely to become insomniac.
"It's not yet solid, but we feel that if you do not succeed in relieving emotional tension, you'll be more likely to become insomniac," says van Someren. "Then, once you're an insomniac, you get into that kind of vicious circle."
The karaoke trial
To examine the potential connection between emotions and insomnia, van Someren had 20 good sleepers and 37 insomniacs who were involved in two difficult tasks: each person described an embarrbading moment that had happened to him in the past, then they sang karaoke, which allowed them. researchers to see how participants' brains responded to embarrbading situations in real time. The participants chose between "Silent Night", "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" or the national anthem of the Netherlands, then listened to the melody on the headphones while the researchers recorded them.
Later, participants had to recall the past embarrbading episode and then listened to 16 exhausting seconds of their unaccompanied karaoke recordings. Meanwhile, van Someren and his team badyzed their brain activity and stress level. van Someren notes that most recordings are extremely embarrbading.
"For most people, it's a very embarrbading experience," he says. "They do not like listening to their own voices, but if they're out of tune and out of sync, they like it even less."
Interestingly, good sleepers and insomniacs showed similar levels of distress when they listened to their karaoke recordings, suggesting that they react just as badly to the humiliation of the moment. But there was a significant difference between the groups when they recalled their past experiences, suggesting that insomniacs internalized embarrbading memories differently.
Insomniacs still had high levels of activation in an area of the brain involved in the treatment of emotions, called cingulate anterior cortex, when they remembered their past experiences, unlike normal sleepers. This represents an "overlap" in the neural circuits, notes the paper, suggesting that they had past embarrbadment similar to being active humiliated
But what really excited Van Someren is that the activation of the anterior cingulate cortex worked well with his earlier work showing some genetic markers of insomnia specific to this region of the brain. "This region of the brain expresses many genes for insomnia risk," he says. "There is some vulnerability there."
Emotional treatment and sleep
This overlap of activation, he says, is actually a product of insomnia that plagues insomniacs. Even good sleepers can stay awake from time to time and then relive a crazy experience, but when they wake up after finally being rested, they usually feel better. Insomniacs, however, often do not feel better because they end up losing sleep, which helps to treat these past emotions in a healthy way.
He suggests imagining that you witnessed someone involved in a car accident at an intersection. At first the experience is upsetting and you could tremble or have a high heart rate. When you fall asleep that night, the brain begins to treat this event in two ways. I hope we will remember the main lesson, namely to look back and forth before crossing. Second, and most importantly, we will forget the feelings of anxiety that accompanied the carnage watching. "These are two things sleep treatment helps," he says. "It helps you remember the effects and forget the emotional or physical experience that results."
Insomniacs may be predisposed to feeling very tense or anxious, which may keep them awake at night, he says. This intermittent and restless sleep can contribute to "insufficient long-term adaptation to emotional memory". In other words, they lose the crucial sleep needed to help them get rid of their emotions, allowing them to remember what it feels like to see this car crash more viscerally, which can lead them to lose more sleep.
Since previous work had shown that anxiety could be both a cause and an effect of sleep deprivation, Van Someren's study adds new evidence to a developing idea. Sleep and emotional health go hand in hand, even when you wake up.
Abstract:
Studies suggest that sleep promotes persistent changes in the neural representation of emotional experiences, so that they are memorized better and less distressing when they are recalled in relation to their initial experience. It is conceivable that sleep fragmentation by awakenings, an essential feature of the insomnia disorder, may hinder the reduction of distress. In this study, we sought additional support for the idea that the insomnia disorder may involve a lasting deficiency to negatively regulate emotional distress. We used functional MRI in insomnia disorder (n = 27) and normal sleepers (n = 30) to determine how brain activation differs between new emotions and mood disorders. conscious emotions. We badessed whether brain activity elicited by the revivification of emotional memories of a distant past resembled the activity elicited by new emotional experiences more in insomnia than in normally sleeping individuals. . Limbic areas have been activated in new shameful experiments compared to neutral experiences in normal sleepers and insomnia disorders. In normal sleepers, reliving shameful experiences of the past did not provoke a limbic reaction. In contrast, participants with insomnia disorder recruited overlapping portions of the limbic circuit, particularly the anterior dorsal cystic cortex, during new or recurrent shameful experiences. Patterns of differential activity with new and old emotions in normal sleepers suggest that reactivation of the long-term memory trace does not recruit the limbic circuit. The overlap of activations in the insomnia disorder is consistent with the hypothesis that the disorder involves a deficit that dissociates the limbic circuit from the trace of emotional memory. In addition, the findings provide additional support for the role played by the anterior cingulate cortex in insomnia.
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