A new study has found that for people with insomnia, embarrassing memories don’t fade with time, as they may with people who sleep well. The evidence seems to point to the idea that the emotional circuits in the brains of people with insomnia don’t disengage from distant memories. On the contrary, people who sleep well seem to fare much better at shedding emotional tension.
Your brain on insomnia
A research team from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam had participants remember an embarrassing experience from one week ago (karaoke with no musical accompaniment, while wearing headphones so they can’t hear themselves) and one from decades ago, while undergoing MRI scans. Some of the participants had insomnia and some didn’t.
The scientists discovered that the group who slept well had two very different brain circuit activations, depending on when the embarrassing moment occurred.
But for the group with insomnia, both embarrassing moments showed overlapping brain circuits, particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC connects regions of the brain that deal with cognitive and emotional processing.
So, even though the more recent embarrassing moment caused shame for the group that slept well, after a night of sleep, they felt much less distressed. But for those with insomnia, nothing had changed by the next day.
ACC and REM
The researchers theorize that insomniacs have genes in their anterior cingulate cortex that don’t activate correctly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This, in turn, prohibits the brain from disengaging emotional circuits from the memories of embarrassing events from the past.
For people with insomnia, “Their restless nights can make them feel worse,” explains first study author Rick Wassing, pointing out that other symptoms besides not sleeping—including lack of energy during the day, moodiness, irritability and struggling to focus—can be a result of insomnia.
The results of the research were published in a paper in the journal Brain.
