{"id":14541,"date":"2019-11-26T14:10:07","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T14:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/squad\/?p=14541"},"modified":"2019-11-26T14:10:07","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T14:10:07","slug":"deep-sleep-might-help-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/sleep\/deep-sleep-might-help-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Sleep Might Help Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experts have linked anxiety to insufficient deep sleep, but a new study helps confirm the causal relationship. In fact, the research shows that one sleepless night can raise anxiety by as much as 30%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><b>How deep sleep helps prevent anxiety<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A research team from the University of California, Berkeley recruited 18 young adults to determine how deep sleep affects anxiety.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">They had the volunteers watch \u201cemotionally unsettling\u201d videos\u2014after a sleepless night and also after a full night\u2019s sleep\u2014and then complete a questionnaire about anxiety. The researchers used fMRI and polysomnography to scan the volunteers\u2019 brains while they sleep to identify various stages of sleep. They found that:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> After a sleepless night, the medial prefrontal cortex was deactivated. (Earlier research has suggested that this region of the brain reduces stress and anxiety.)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Other areas of the brain that deal with processing emotions had excessive activity.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cDeep sleep had restored the brain\u2019s prefrontal mechanism that regulates our emotions, lowering emotional and physiological reactivity and preventing the escalation of anxiety,\u201d says Eti Ben Simon, the study\u2019s lead author, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. \u201cPeople with anxiety disorders routinely report having disturbed sleep, but rarely is sleep improvement considered as a clinical recommendation for lowering anxiety. Our study not only establishing a causal connection between sleep and anxiety, but it identifies the kind of deep non-REM sleep we need to calm the overanxious brain.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Types of sleep<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are two broad categories of sleep:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> rapid eye movement (REM)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">And<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> non-REM sleep<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Non-REM sleep has three stages. The first two include periods of light sleep. This is when our bodies make the adjustment from wakefulness to rest. The third stage is the deep sleep that helps us feel restored for the next day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">REM sleep is the phase in which we dream.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Experts have linked anxiety to insufficient deep sleep, but a new study helps confirm the causal relationship. In fact, the research shows that one sleepless night can raise anxiety by as much as 30%. \u00a0How deep sleep helps prevent anxiety A research team from the University of California, Berkeley recruited 18 young adults to determine [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[692],"tags":[766,693],"class_list":["post-14541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sleep","tag-anxiety","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}