Sleep Basics: Who's in charge?
- Janice Cunningham
- Feb 25, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 6
Traditional advice for adopting new healthy behaviors focused on emphasizing willpower and a little self-regulation. Everyone likes to think we are in control, but are we? Ask any sleep expert and you'll quickly learn why it's not that simple.
Sleep alone has superpowers for changing our perceptions, our desires, and our state of mind for better or worse. It shapes how our brain makes daily choices. Good sleep helps us restore normalcy and self-regulation. Poor sleep can hijack the brain.
This post highlights some of the most dramatic recent findings about essential functions of sleep that influence our choices and behavior. These include:
Choices, Patience & Perception
Sleep directly influences our choices by influencing signals to the brain through hormones and other processes. Here are a few high-impact examples.
#1. Releasing our Inner Cookie Monster!
With poor sleep, the hunger hormone Ghrelin goes up, telling our brain we need more food long after we should feel full. Poor sleep also drives cravings for sugary comfort foods. Our inner Cookie Monster is chanting "Eat more! Better yet, get that bag of sugar-loaded chocolate chip cookies. They'll make you feel so much better!"
At the same time, the satiety (fullness) sensing hormone Leptin goes down so no one is telling the brain we've had enough, time to stop eating.
To make matters worse, the connections between our rational brain areas (like our relatively young prefrontal cortex) and our reactive reptilian brain areas (like the amygdala), are weakened with lack of sleep. These weaker connections make it harder for our logical brain (the prefrontal cortex) to override the amygdala impulses when the brain receives the messed up messages from hormones like Ghrelin and Leptin. Impulse control is under attack from multiple sources!
#2. Losing Our Patience - Losing Intentional Choice
With too little REM sleep, the brain doesn't have enough time to fully recalibrate our mind-state. Impatience is a natural byproduct and irritability goes up. Combine this with reduced impulse control and logical choice goes out the window. The executive brain is no longer in control!
I see this in me on those days when I don't get my REM sleep. I'm more easily agitated, say much I immediately regret, and I am far less pleasant to be around! #3. Perception - Reading and Responding to Social Cues.
Lack of REM sleep also affects how we perceive the world around us. Matt Walker's sleep lab's research demonstrated this phenomenon - how those who could "effortlessly" distinguish between positive or menacing signals after a good night's sleep could no longer do so with any accuracy after a bad night's sleep.
Walker further explains how this 'misread' leads people to see the world as a more hostile place: It triggers the brain to operate under a 'default of fear bias.' (Why We Sleep, pages 214 -215)
I am surprised at how few people appear to know about this implication of poor sleep. If you know anyone who may be experiencing this effect, please have them check out Why We Sleep or the this link for the research paper on the topic. Emotional Balance, Depression and Anxiety
REM sleep gives us a free nightly therapy session! It helps us deal with our emotions and keeps our perception skills well-tuned for reading the people around us. We're better able to make rational choices appropriate to the situation.
Conversely, lack of REM sleep prevents us from working through our emotions and can make us hyper-reactive or hyper-emotional. At the same time, these are compounded by losing our ability to accurately perceive other people's emotions and intent as mentioned above. Consider these two examples.
#1 REM Sleep - The Best Therapy Session
REM sleep provides a safe space to revisit and work through difficult or traumatic events. Production of the stress-related, anxiety-producing neurochemical noradrenaline is effectively shut off during the REM sleep dream state, which is key to creating this safe space. Even our heart rate doesn't rise as one would expect when reliving traumatic events.
This mechanism allows us to process our lives and reduce the emotional intensity of our experiences so everything feels more manageable the next day. Without this opportunity, we are more likely to become hyper-emotional and predisposed to depression, anxiety and emotion-laden choices.
#2. Emotional Responses
When the brain loses REM sleep's therapy session, the dream state in particular, we lose the opportunity to create distance from and take the edge off upsetting events. We can get stuck living in a hyper-emotional state where we over-react and get upset with people or situations we would normally brush off or not even register as upsetting.
Once again, we see a loss of impulse control due to a loss of connections between our rational brain area and our more emotional, primitive brain areas.
Final Word
These functions are the reason I made sleep my #1 priority. How can anyone follow through on their best intentions for anything - eating, exercise, being social, or de-stressing - if their rational brain's impulse control is compromised and they're struggling for emotional balance, fighting depression, or dealing with anxiety made worse through poor sleep and dysregulated perceptions of threat?
Conversely, getting better sleep makes everything more doable and more pleasant!
For JC notes, worksheets, and links to the experts for more detail, explore our Sleep Playbook Portal.
Wishing you all the best,
Janice
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