Mind Your Zzzzzzs

"Many people aren't getting enough sleep as they sacrifice rest time to work, especially on devices that emit blue light. This light makes falling asleep more difficult, further eroding the quantity and quality of sleep."
"We need to rediscover the value of sleep and appreciate the benefits it brings to our brains. Time spent sleeping is an essential investment towards being smarter, making better decisions, and leading a happier life."
Jakke Tamminen, lecturer, Royal Holloway, United Kingdom

Conserving brain power. Shutterstock

Casino owners are aware of facts that researchers validate, that insufficient sleep can make people choose to perform risky manoeuvres. That sleep deprivation can make people behave in irrational ways, and become irritable. People who have rested inadequately are prone to making poor decisions. They appear incapable of thinking matters through to local conclusions. Intelligence is compromised by negative emotions arising, provoked by lack of sleep.

And they use this knowledge to their commercial advantage, to advance their bottom line. The environment of casinos is one featuring bright lights, plenty of sound. A paucity of windows helps, too, all designed to mask the passage of time from sleep-deprived clients completely immersed in concentrating through the difficulty of paying close attention to what they are doing, but continuing to make unfocused and potentially insecure, chance-risky moves.

Some researchers believe that inadequate sleep results in, among other negative reactions, heightened emotional reactivity to situations that would normally be handled far differently. In the case of sleep-deprived subjects, emotional over-reaction or inappropriate reactions to situations that may be far from out-of-the-ordinary, yet unable to be handled as one might ordinarily when the brain cannot function normally as a result of tiredness.

Restricted sleep events lead to an increase in irritability, bleak moods, depression, anger, and anxiety. None of which do credit to an individual's capacity to live a full, satisfying and responsible lifestyle. All of which emotions going hand-in-hand with sleep deprivation, cause a diminished quality of life. Stress and anger cause people to experience difficulty in performing tasks they can ordinarily perform with ease. And the emotional toll sleep-deprivation takes does no favours to personal relationships.

Science allows researchers to use technology that outlines in full living colour what occurs within the brain, as brain imaging techniques reveal the influence of sleep deprivation on irrational emotional responses. Brain imaging reveals that the emotional control centre deep within the brain, called the amygdala is affected by lack of adequate sleep. Sleep-deprived subjects are seen to react when exposed to negative images triggering an increased activity level in the amygdala.

Sleep deprivation disrupts the connection between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain which itself regulates amygdala function. Lack of sleep has the effect of inciting the amygdala to overreact when exposed to negative stimuli, since it has become disconnected from brain areas whose purpose is to moderate its response under normal circumstances, which is to say, in sleep-rested brains.

Dream machine. Shutterstock

The hippocampus is another brain area that reacts dramatically as a result of sleep deprivation. A region critical for memory storage, the capacity to memorize new information takes a significant drop when people are deprived of sleep for one night, let alone on a constant basis. Sleep-deprived participants in one study indicated a reduction in activation in the hippocampus in comparison to participants who were adequately rested.

The hippocampus, to compartmentalize new information to other areas of the brain for storage purposes loses that function when lack of sleep is involved; the storage capacity may become impaired and in the process prevents new information from being stored as it normally would be, under rested-stage circumstances.