Insomnia is just one out of many debilitating disorders out there. But it’s also one of the most underrated. For one thing, insomnia has serious long-term detrimental effects on physical and mental health. For another, it can act as a marker of serious mental disorders like schizophrenia. In the United States, two out of five adults regularly fail to get enough sleep. Unfortunately, these same people not only feel moody and lethargic the next day, but increase their risk of cardiovascular disease. Just like other serious disorders, insomnia should be approached with a strong sense of therapeutic urgency.
But a series of recent studies have found that insomnia’s effects aren’t just limited to mood changes and fatigue, but extend to another crucial aspect of our social lives: our emotions. We can’t underestimate how important emotions are in our interactions with others. If you feel negative emotion on a given day, your interactions with friends and loved ones will be messy at best. On the other hand, if you exude positive emotion, others will want to form social bonds with you.
How exactly has insomnia been shown to mess with our emotions? The obvious answer is that insomnia, especially chronic insomnia, can lead to anxiety and depression. Insomnia is an independent risk factor for depression and other psychiatric disorders, and so there’s a direct link between it and negative emotions.
But the recent studies mentioned above show that insomnia has a very different kind of impact on our emotional capacities. In psychology studies, a standard technique to assess whether people accurately perceive emotions is done through emotion recognition tests. One such typical test consists of presentating of faces laden with different emotional content—neutral, angry, sad, happy, etc. A recent study tested the emotion recognition abilities of insomniacs as compared with good sleepers. They found that insomniacs had difficulty judging the intensity of emotionally-charged faces. Specifically, insomniacs judged sadness and fear to be significantly less intense than their good-sleeping peers. In another study, insomniacs are shown to have a lower capacity of expressing emotions.
The upshot of these studies is that insomnia impairs emotional regulation, and this is particularly relevant for social interaction. Further neurobiological evidence shows that when insomniacs look at pictures of faces, there is heightened amygdala activity in the brain. The amygdala is associated with the fight-or-flight response; in other words, stress and/or anxiety. Sleep deprivation, then, causes heightened amygdala activity, thus higher anxiety and stress. When locked into fight-or-flight mode, people will naturally be on the defensive, and inclined to interpret neutral events or objects as threatening. Unfortunately, when sleep deprivation causes us to find friendly people threatening, our social interactions will suffer greatly. This can then lead to a slippery-slope of negative emotion accumulation.
Fortunately, researchers have made some progress in trying to solve the insomnia riddle. But just like any other disorder, progress is gradual, and a single grand cure is still far off. A number of therapeutic approaches, however, are available, and they can go a long way in fixing the problem. For instance, insomnia can be treated if there is underlying anxiety and depression that causes it to begin with, and if these underlying states are dealt with. Medication can work as well. Psychotherapy—especially Cognitive Behavioral Therapy—can lead to improvements.
Finally, a number of mobile apps targeting insomnia are now on the market. You can find an extensive list of sleep aid apps here. Sleepio, an app created by an Oxford professor, uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to teach you sleeping techniques. Other apps use content as diverse as white noise, relaxing melodies, yoga, breathing exercises, etc, to help calm your mind and put you to sleep. They can be quite effective, so you might want to download one of those apps if you’re an insomniac.
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