Dr. Matt Walker

erratic pendulum like sort of responsivity when you're not getting sufficient sleep that notion of i just snap dot dot dot or you apologize and you say look i am so sorry i just bit your head off i just haven't been getting enough sleep and so we could start to understand what in the brain was happening when you didn't get sleep it's such an important finding uh for a couple of reasons that maybe we can explore um previously on the podcast we had a guest um

And a great example of that people can think of, if all of a sudden a gun is pointed in your face, you would want your amygdala to react.

if it's in the real world.

But if you're at the movie theaters and you see a gun pointed in your face, your amygdala doesn't really react as much.

Why?

Because your prefrontal cortex understood the word that you described, which is context.

But in some ways, it seems as though you become almost regressed to this more basic, fundamental, elemental, emotional brain.

And the red mist descends, and you really can't see much more because your prefrontal cortex seems to be absent.

It is a grim situation, and we've certainly heard that from patients and individuals.

It's almost as though...

the world that they are experiencing, they look at and they say, you know what?

You're in an 11 and I need you at a seven right now.

It is just too much.

And this comes back to that result that we described that when the amygdala crosses the threshold,

and says, okay, things are getting emotional, things are getting unpleasant, I'm gonna be responding negatively in an angry way or a fearful way, that starts much earlier.

So the threshold for triggering your emotional aversive reaction

is much lower and that's why the person's voice when you hear it at first normally if you had a great night of sleep you'd say gosh you know what today i really love your energy it's it's really it's so infectious versus a day when you're not sleeping you just think i just i'm lifting my earbuds out of my ears because i don't know if i can take this much longer and so

That was where we were able to manipulate sleep one way, which is to say, I dial sleep down and then I look at the emotional brain and you can see this ramping up of the emotional reactivity in these basic kind of guttural centers.

But then we wanted to do the inverse.

We wanted to instead see if we could insert sleep back in, in other words, manipulate sleep and dial it back up.