How Sleep Helps Your Brain Manage Fear

That sleep, particularly REM sleep (REM sleep is the light sleep phases often associated with dreaming), helps consolidate emotions has been long known. But these researchers found out precisely how this happens in brain cells themselves and this is pretty cool, I have to say.

So, what did they find?

First off, these researchers conditioned mice to two signals. One a fear signal and second, a safety signal. These are the two obvious big emotions in terms of survival and something that is present in all species of animal. They were then able to precisely track these signals in the mice.

What they then found during sleep was astonishing. They found that there was decoupling within neurons to these signals. Specifically, the cell body seemed to be deactivated whereas the dendrites the connecting arms of the neurons activated and processing the emotion. This, the researchers note translates into preferential processing in sleep of safety signals and avoidance of overgeneralising fear emotions which can become generalised anxiety — and they suspect potentially lead to anxiety disorders.

So, the brain needs sleep to process emotions and recorrect emotional signalling but specifically the decoupling of brain cells enables the processing of fear without generalising this. Clever old brain cells.

So, another, another, very good reason to get a good night’s sleep. If you are wondering how much — this latest research here answers that.