Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Sleep Loss = Depression (Some sciency type stuff!)

I'm usually fairly long-winded when I blog. It's a general weakness that involves ALWAYS giving long answers and an aversion to single syllable words. BUT I'm not going to tax your eyes today, friends. I just have a short, science-y snippet to share. This is taken from the book Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

"Perhaps most fascinating [about sleep loss], the emotional context of memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine."


So, if you need another reason to go to bed earlier, there you go. Now get some sleep already!! (Says the mother of four small children, two of whom wake up at least three times a night. . .)

4 comments:

Kelly said...

Interesting book -- I took a sneak peek at the first part of the book online and I'm hooked already.

I always knew sleep loss made me grumpy. Now we know why!

AllisonK said...

Laura,

I found you from MotleyVision and I wanted to thank you for your post and Pres. Kimball quote. I have never thought about blogging in that way. I look forward to reading more here.

Coffinberry said...

That chapter (which I read on Tuesday) gave us our Family Goal for the next 21 days... to improve Mom & Dad's sleep habits! We've been getting 4.5 to 5 hours sleep/night for so long that our bodies have forgotten how to sleep longer.

Debbie Cluff said...

New follower to your blog. Come on over and follow my mormon confessions... if you like them

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