Dr. Matt Walker

And basically we calculate a change score.

Has your anxiety the next morning increased, stayed the same, or decreased?

And then we correlate that with the different stages.

And what we found was that...

the electrical quality of your deep non-rem sleep was very much predictive of your dissipation of anxiety overnight and this helped me realize gosh it's much more complex these are beautiful surprises you get from research when you yeah you like

You have this hypothesis and you look at, you see REM sleep, no signal of predictive relationship with anxiety.

And I say, of course, because I'm idiotic, rerun the analysis.

Just go back to raw data and the REM sleep signal was so strong.

Rerun the analysis and you get exactly the same result.

It's deep non-REM sleep.

Great, okay.

then what is that deep non-REM sleep doing to help dissipate the anxiety?

But here again was a commonality with emotion.

What we found is that the greater the amount of deep non-REM sleep, the greater the re-engagement of your frontal lobe was the next day.

And that was predicting the dissipation of your anxiety the next morning.

So we really started to understand this sort of critical bi-directional relationship, but it was a very complex one.

That yes, anxiety can disrupt your sleep.

And yes, disrupted sleep can predict your next day anxiety.

But it wasn't the same stage of sleep that we thought before.

It was the opposite.