Dr. Matt Walker

And what we found was that with a night of sleep, the medial prefrontal cortex was strongly connected to the amygdala.

Why is that important?

It's because that part of your frontal lobe is very good at acting like a control rational mechanism on your deep sort of, you know, it's not Neanderthal, but your deep emotional brain centers.

But without sleep, we found that that connection had been severed.

And so it was almost as though without sleep, you become all emotional gas pedal and too little regulatory control break.

And so you couldn't modulate those emotions anywhere near as effectively.

Now, some people may say, well, hang on a second, that was a total night of sleep deprivation.

And that's not really relevant for me because I don't sleep enough.

I know that from all of the previous episodes that I've gone through here, hopefully, if you've listened to them.

But I'm usually maybe getting five or six hours of sleep.

Is this really relevant?

So we started doing that study.

We wanted to say, let's do what we call an ecological study, more of a real world sleep restriction rather than total deprivation.

And we were about halfway through that study when a wonderful Japanese research group essentially published the study that we were doing.

And what was great is that they did it even in a more rigorous way.

And essentially what they were able to do is replicate exactly what we'd found, but now by putting people on sort of less than six hours of sleep for five nights.

And sure enough, you got the same response.

So that was very clear to us that there was some sensitivity.

There's a reason why you become so unbuckled emotionally when you are not getting sufficient sleep.

It's the reason that you have almost this sort of