Often in the dead of night, some people lie in bed and start emo up, recalling what happened during the day, which makes people anxious or depressed. After reading this article, you will know that thinking too much can't solve the problem, and the best way to get rid of these emotional troubles is to sleep. As the saying goes, sleeping is no big deal! Not to mention, this sentence may have a certain scientific basis.
A new study recently published in science supports this view. Researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland found that the brain can classify emotions during sleep, consolidate positive emotions and inhibit negative emotions. Researchers have repeatedly stressed that sleep is very important in mental health.
Dealing with different emotions and distinguishing between dangerous and safe emotions is a necessary skill for animal survival. Once there are too many negative emotions, it is easy to lead to post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorder and other pathological states.
This emotional processing process is likely to be inseparable from the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage, in which dreams are accompanied by many strong emotions. Professor Antoine adamantidis of the Department of Neurology at the University of Bern has been puzzled that the prefrontal cortex is very active in dealing with these emotions during the day, but it is unusually quiet during REM sleep.
This contradictory phenomenon shows that in rem stage, something happens in the brain that we don't know yet.
To find out, the researchers selected a group of mice and asked them to constantly recognize safety and danger related sounds, which allowed the mice to accumulate different emotions. Accordingly, the responses of brain neurons to the two stimuli are also different. Subsequently, they began to record changes in neuronal activity during wakefulness and sleep.
As a complex structure, neurons have dendrites that receive information, cell bodies that integrate information, and axons that output signals. However, in the REM stage, the working state of different parts of prefrontal cortical neurons is different. At this time, although their dendrites are activated, the cell body remains silent.
Professor adamantidis explained: "this means that the two parts of the work have been decoupled. The dendrites are awake, but the cell body is asleep." Dendrites are responsible for processing dangerous and safe emotional information, but because the cell body is in a resting state, this information will not be output during REM sleep.
So the brain can distinguish different kinds of emotions in the dendrites of neurons, but it inhibits our overreaction to emotions, especially reducing our response to negative emotions.
When researchers specifically inhibited dendrites, mice lost the ability to distinguish dangerous information in learning behavior. Studies have pointed out that this neuronal decoupling mechanism helps us maintain the stability of our physical state. If we still overreact to many fears and anxiety during sleep, we are prone to various mental diseases.
Therefore, if you feel too stressed during the day and your brain is in a sense of anxiety and loss, be sure to give your brain a chance to rest at night and let it stop spreading these negative emotional messages. Of course, in addition to helping solve emotional problems, adequate sleep is beneficial to many aspects of health. Don't emo wait until dawn!
reference material:
[1] How sleep helps to process emotions。 Retrieved May 16th， 2022 from https：//medicalxpress.com/news/2022-05-emotions.html
[2] Mattia Aime et al， Paradoxical somatodendritic decoupling supports cortical plasticity during REM sleep， Science （2022）。 DOI： 10.1126/science.abk2734