No, it is not just because you are a little more irritable when you do not rest well.
Sleeping poorly affects you in several ways, from increasing your blood sugar level to sabotaging your training. Now you can add one more to the list: a new study in Neurobiology of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms suggests that it makes you terrible to interpret certain emotions.
Researchers at the University of Arizona came to this conclusion, after having 54 participants identify facial expressions in photographs after a good night’s sleep, and after being completely deprived of rest. The results? Even just a little less than ideal night’s rest can affect your ability to identify happiness and sadness.
Researchers believe that sleep plays a huge role in recalibrating the brain’s emotional functioning by strengthening connections between various brain regions. When it doesn’t get this reset, your brain may use resources that would otherwise be used to recognize emotions wisely, for more vital tasks. As a result, your ability to identify subtle facial cues may suffer.
Now, emotions like happiness and sadness are considered? Social emotions? the researchers indicated. They are different from emotions linked to the perception of threats such as anger, fear, surprise or disgust. In the study, participants maintained the ability to accurately identify those emotions, even with the lap skirt on.
This may be because we are programmed to recognize these more primitive emotions in case of danger, explains Dr. William Killgore. Confusing these emotions, in certain instances, could be a life-threatening mistake.
On the other hand, not knowing if the person next to you is sad may not pose any danger to you. But you will be at risk of being an idiot, because? Interpret? people is part of social inclusion, according to the study. Think about it, do you think your girlfriend is going to like that you can’t identify if she’s having a bad time?
The good news is that if you get proper rest again, these brain connections, vital for identifying subtle emotional cues, will start working again. In the study, it took only one night of restful sleep for participants to improve their ability to recognize emotions.