Lack Of Sleep Makes Us Selfish

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Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences

Sleeping well is essential to brain health

We humans are a social species, we do things in groups, gather in restaurants, bars, music venues, and public spaces together. We work together, play sports together, join clubs and associations. We also help others and give immense amounts of money to charities of all sorts. Yes, we are a very social – unless we get a bad night’s sleep.

Ok,  that might be a bit of an exaggeration – we are still social after a bad night’s sleep – we are just less social on average according to research just out.

Eti Ben Simon from the University of California Berkley collected data in three separate scenarios to come to this conclusion.

The first scanned the brains of 24 participants after a normal night’s sleep and after no sleep. We know this causes multiple disruptions in our cognitive ability and how the brain connects and communicates to itself and with the body. In fact, all of us who have missed a night’s sleep know this from experience.

But what they specifically found is that regions of the brain associated with empathy and relating to other people’s wants and needs was less active.

A second study tracked 100 people online over three or four nights. They tracked their sleep patterns and then measured their willingness to help others in different ways such as holding the door open for a stranger, volunteering, or helping an injured person on the street.

Here they noticed that a decrease in the quality of sleep left people significantly less willing to help others.

The third piece of data came from mining a data set on over 3 million charitable donations over 5 years to look at the impact of transition from daylight saving hours, and hence potentially losing and hours sleep.

They found a drop in charitable donations of 10% (but only in locations that had lost this I hour). This effect was more surprising because it is only a small disruption to sleep patterns but showed a significant impact.

All this leads them to saying that yes, losing sleep will make you less generous. That is in combination with the multiple other negative impacts on just about every aspect of your health and wellbeing.

So, for the sake of yourself, and now we also know, others, get a good night’s sleep.

Andy Habermacher

Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker, speaking on the brain and human behaviour.

Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).

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Reference

Eti Ben Simon, Raphael Vallat, Aubrey Rossi, Matthew P. Walker. 
Sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies. 
PLOS Biology, 2022; 20 (8): e3001733
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001733

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