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%.
How deep sleep helps prevent anxiety
A research team from the University of California, Berkeley recruited 18 young adults to determine how deep sleep affects anxiety.
They had the volunteers watch “emotionally unsettling” videos—after a sleepless night and also after a full night’s sleep—and then complete a questionnaire about anxiety. The researchers used fMRI and polysomnography to scan the volunteers’ brains while they sleep to identify various stages of sleep. They found that:
- After a sleepless night, the medial prefrontal cortex was deactivated. (Earlier research has suggested that this region of the brain reduces stress and anxiety.)
- Other areas of the brain that deal with processing emotions had excessive activity.
“Deep sleep had restored the brain’s prefrontal mechanism that regulates our emotions, lowering emotional and physiological reactivity and preventing the escalation of anxiety,” says Eti Ben Simon, the study’s lead author, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. “People 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.”
Types of sleep
There are two broad categories of sleep:
- rapid eye movement (REM)
And
- non-REM sleep
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.
REM sleep is the phase in which we dream.
