A sleepless night can leave the brain spinning with anxiety the next day.
The study shows that “this is a two-way interaction,” said Clifford Saper, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who wasn’t involved in the study. “The sleep loss makes the anxiety worse, which in turn makes it harder to sleep.”
Sleep researchers Eti Ben Simon and Matthew Walker, both of the University of California at Berkeley, studied the anxiety levels of 18 healthy people. Following either a night of sleep or a night of staying awake, these people took anxiety tests the next morning. After sleep deprivation, anxiety levels in these healthy people were 30 percent higher than when they had slept.
On average, the anxiety scores reached levels seen in people with anxiety disorders, Ben Simon said in a news briefing on Nov. 5.
Sleep-deprived people’s brain activity also changed. In response to emotional videos, brain areas involved in emotions were more active. The prefrontal cortex, an area that can put the brakes on anxiety, was less active, functional MRI scans showed.
The results suggest that poor sleep “is more than just a symptom” of anxiety, but in some cases, may be a cause, Ben Simon said.