Sometimes the world feels like a dark place at night. Negative thoughts can drift through your mind under the cover of darkness, and as you lie awake, you might start craving guilty pleasures, like a cigarette or a meal.
There is a lot of evidence suggesting that the human mind works differently at night. Negative emotions draw our attention more than positive ones, dangerous ideas grow in appeal, and inhibitions fall away.
A new paper outlines the evidence of how brain systems function differently after dark and suggests that the human circadian rhythm is involved.
The human body and the human mind follow a natural 24 hour cycle of activity, according to their hypothesis.
Our species feels and acts in certain ways at certain times of the day. In the daytime, the levels of genes and activity in the brain are different. We usually sleep at night.
This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Humans are better at hunting and gathering in the daytime than at night, and they were once more at risk of being hunted.
Our attention to negative stimuli is heightened at night. Hyper-focus on the negative can feed into an altered reward/motivation system, making a person particularly prone to risky behaviors.
This state of consciousness only becomes more problematic when sleep loss is included.
There are millions of people who are awake in the middle of the night, and there is evidence that their brain is not functioning as well as it does during the day.
Their health and safety, as well as that of others, is affected by that.
Two examples are used by the authors of the hypothesis. The first example is of a heroin user who is able to manage their cravings in the day but can't keep them at night.
A college student is struggling with insomnia and begins to feel a sense of loneliness and despair as the sleepless nights pile up.
Both scenarios can end tragically. At night, there are a lot of suicides and self- harm. There is a three-fold higher risk of suicide between midnight and 6 am according to some research.
According to a study done in 2020, nocturnal wakefulness is a suicide risk factor.
The authors of the 'Mind After Midnight' hypothesis say that suicide emerges as an escape from loneliness and pain, and before the costs of suicide are considered, the student has acquired the means and is prepared to act.
People are more likely to take drugs at night. At a supervised drug consumption center in Brazil, there was research that showed a higher risk of overdose at night.
Some of these behaviors could be explained by sleep debt or the cover that darkness provides.
We need to investigate these factors further to make sure we protect those most at risk from nighttime wakefulness.
The authors say no studies have examined the impact of sleep deprivation on reward processing.
We don't know how shift workers cope with their unusual sleep routines.
We don't know a lot about how the brain works. The mind after midnight isn't clear.
There is a study published in network psychology.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
