Like many UC Berkeley students, Ryan Peden is a chronic late-night sleeper. His regular sleep schedule is from 3 or 4 a.m. to about 8 a.m., which is two to three hours less than the widely recommended seven to eight hours of sleep.
“The thing is, the less I sleep, the more awake I feel,” Peden said. “But at the same time,I would feel frustrated over a small quiz, which I usually wouldn’t care about.”
According to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience last Wednesday led by professor of psychology Matthew P. Walker, losing sleep can increase anticipatory anxiety, which occurs with the anticipation of a stressful event. The study, titled “Tired and Apprehensive: Anxiety Amplifies the Impact of Sleep Loss on Aversive Brain Anticipation,” confirms the positive correlation between sleep deprivation and certain kinds of anxiety.
Although previous research has indicated that lack of sleep and mental nervousness occur simultaneously, this experiment confirmed the cause-effect relationship between the two — sleep loss triggers anxiety.
Walker and the team tested 18 young adults ranging from 18 to 30 years old at UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, scanning their brains once after a healthy sleep period and once after a night of no sleep. During each run, 90 images were passed by the participants for viewing in a period of 45 minutes as the MRI scanned their neural activity. These image stimuli were either emotional negative or neutral.
In conducting the study, researchers gave participants visual cues before the actual pictures appeared in order to monitor an anticipatory response of anxiety. A yellow circle hinted a neutral image, a red minus sign insinuated a disturbing picture and a white question mark suggested a surprise display — either a disturbing image or a neutral one.
The results showed that when waiting in anticipation as the white question mark popped up, the sleep deprived individuals displayed abnormally high activity in the amygdala and insular cortex of the brain compared to the well-rested ones. Excessive anticipatory responding and associated hyper-reactivity in these two regions are indicators of anxiety. People who are naturally more anxious, which was determined in an interview before the test, showed the most dramatic activity in these two regions.
Lead researcher Andrea Goldstein, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience, says she hopes to see her hypotheses tested in clinically anxious populations in the near future.
“If poor sleep is in fact contributing to anxiety disorders as this study suggests, then it’s possible that treatments improving sleep may also aid in reducing anxiety,” Goldstein said.
The findings of the research may offer promise for those with clinical anxiety. This could also serve as an important warning to anxious students on campus: Sleep well before that 8 a.m. exam.
Contact Mark Tan at mtan@dailycal.org
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