Our elders always suggest we never sleep angry. Many of us think it is just bullshit. You might think staying up after a fight proves you care about your relationship. Thus, you started thinking about fixing what was wrong. Sleeping angry not only impacts the next day but it also causes cumulative and harmful effects. Even scientists now have evidence of it.
Scientists from Beijing Normal University in China have found that sleeping angry actually combines bad memories, making you live with them longer.
Healthy sleep is essential for optimal learning and memory function. Sleep combines our memories. It plays an essential role in how we process and store useful information. However, according to a new study, the same principle can cause negative thoughts. If we sleep with them, they can be hard to forget in the long term.
Yunzhe Liu and his colleagues involved 73 volunteers in the study. All volunteers were male college students.
Additionally, scientists trained the participants to associate images of neutral faces with disturbing images of things—for example, injured people, mutilated bodies, and crying children. Scientists actually wanted to discover how sleeping impacts the process, so they tested how well volunteers could skip the negative memories.
On the next day, scientists showed neutral faces to volunteers. Later, they asked volunteers to recall negative thoughts and how they ignored them. For that purpose, they used a psychological technique called think/no-think. In this technique, participants are instructed to think or not think about the targetted item.
When participants were asked to think, they actively tried to recall the information. For example, they remembered the associations they had learned between the faces and the negative imagery. Similarly, when participants were asked not to think, they consciously tried to avoid thinking about it. According to researchers, this task can actually help people forget things they have learned.
During the recalling process, scientists used brain scans and FMRI techniques to investigate why this was happening. When the participants tried to remember or inhibit their memories, their neural activity was clicked in the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that primarily associates with memory.
Scientists conducted a think/no-think session after just half an hour in the next cycle. This time, they wanted to see if rectifying the bad memories early could help the participants forget.
After analyzing and comparing both cycles, scientists found that the suppression efforts after half an hour are better than 24 hours. Scientists suggest that a night’s sleep helps to consolidate negative memories, making them hard to inhibit later intentionally.
Liu said, “Overnight consolidation makes the aversive memory more resistant to suppression by promoting hippocampal-neocortical reorganization of the memory.“
“That means, if you want to forget about something unpleasant or angry moment, it may be better to try to resolve how you feel about it or move past it before you go to bed, as those memories could spread deeper and wider in your brain if you don’t.“
According to researchers, the research could help develop new reconsolidation techniques. Thus, old memories can be modified through psychological interventions, which might spur research into other treatments. It could even help researchers develop better treatments for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.
Liu advised, “Try to get a bad memory out of their minds as soon as they can. Do not think about it too much, and especially not to sleep on it.“
Journal Reference
- Liu, Y., Lin, W., Liu, C., Luo, Y., Wu, J., Bayley, P. J., & Qin, S. (2016). Memory consolidation reconfigures neural pathways involved in the suppression of emotional memories. Nature Communications, 7(1), 1-12. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13375