Psych Central News
Sleep Loss Increases Anxiety — Especially Among Worriers
If the answer is yes, the issue may be a lack of sleep, say researchers at the University of California – Berkeley.
Scientists have found that a lack of sleep, common in anxiety disorders, may play a key role in activating brain regions that contribute to excessive worrying.
Neuroscientists have found that sleep deprivation fires up areas of the brain associated with emotional processing. The resulting pattern mimics the abnormal neural activity seen in anxiety disorders.
Researchers also believe that chronic worriers – those who are naturally more anxious and therefore more likely to develop a full-blown anxiety disorder – are acutely vulnerable to the impact of insufficient sleep.
“These findings help us realize that those people who are anxious by nature are the same people who will suffer the greatest harm from sleep deprivation,” said Matthew Walker, Ph.D., the senior author of a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The results suggest that people suffering from such maladies as generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder, may benefit substantially from sleep therapy.
At UC Berkeley, psychologists such as Dr. Allison Harvey, a co-author on the Journal of Neuroscience paper, have been garnering encouraging results in studies that use sleep therapy on patients with depression, bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses.
“If sleep disruption is a key factor in anxiety disorders, as this study suggests, then it’s a potentially treatable target,” Walker said.
“By restoring good quality sleep in people suffering from anxiety, we may be able to help ameliorate their excessive worry and disabling fearful expectations.”
While previous research has indicated that sleep disruption and psychiatric disorders often occur together, this latest study is the first to causally demonstrate that sleep loss triggers excessive anticipatory brain activity associated with anxiety, researchers said.
“It’s been hard to tease out whether sleep loss is simply a byproduct of anxiety, or whether sleep disruption causes anxiety,” said Andrea Goldstein, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in neuroscience and lead author of the study. “This study helps us understand that causal relationship more clearly.”
In their experiments, Walker and his research team scanned the brains of 18 healthy young adults as they viewed dozens of images, first after a good night’s rest, and again after a sleepless night.
The images were either neutral, disturbing or alternated between both.
Participants in the experiments reported a wide range of baseline anxiety levels, but none fit the criteria for a clinical anxiety disorder.
After getting a full night’s rest at the lab, which researchers monitored by measuring neural electrical activity, their brains were scanned via functional MRI as they waited to be shown, and then viewed 90 images during a 45-minute session.
To trigger anticipatory anxiety, researchers primed the participants using one of three visual cues prior to each series of images.
A large red minus sign signaled to participants that they were about to see a highly unpleasant image, such as a death scene. A yellow circle portended a neutral image, such as a basket on a table.
Perhaps most stressful was a white question mark, which indicated that either a grisly image or a bland, innocuous one was coming, and kept participants in a heightened state of suspense.
When sleep-deprived and waiting in suspenseful anticipation for a neutral or disturbing image to appear, activity in the emotional brain centers of all the participants soared, especially in the amygdala and the insular cortex.
Notably, the amplifying impact of sleep deprivation was most dramatic for those people who were innately anxious to begin with.
“This discovery illustrates how important sleep is to our mental health,” said Walker. “It also emphasizes the intimate relationship between sleep and psychiatric disorders, both from a cause and a treatment perspective.”
Source: University of California-Berkeley
Positive Incentives & Rewards More Likely to Encourage Healthy Behaviors
Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed — as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people — makes a big difference.
The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing.
Researcher David Tannenbaum, Ph.D., of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, wanted to investigate how framing healthcare incentives might influence people’s attitudes toward the incentives.
“Two frames that are logically equivalent can communicate qualitatively different messages,” Tannenbaum explains.
In the first study, 126 participants read about a fictional company grappling with managing their employee health-care policy. They were told that the company was facing rising healthcare costs, due in part to an increasing percentage of overweight employees, and were shown one of four final policy decisions.
The “carrot” plan gave a $500 premium reduction to healthy-weight people, while the “stick” plan increased premiums for overweight people by $500. The two plans were functionally equivalent, structured such that healthy-weight employees always paid $2,000 per year in health care costs, and overweight employees always paid $2500 per year.
There were also two additional “stick” plans that resulted in a $2400 premium for overweight people.
Participants were more likely to see the “stick” plans as punishment for being overweight and were less likely to endorse them.
But they didn’t appear to differentiate between the three “stick” plans despite the $100 premium difference. Instead, they seemed to evaluate the plans on moral grounds, deciding that punishing someone for being overweight was wrong regardless of the potential savings to be had.
The data showed that framing incentives in terms of penalties may have particular psychological consequences for affected individuals: People with higher body mass index (BMI) scores reported that they would feel particularly stigmatized and dissatisfied with their employer under the three “stick” plans.
Another study placed participants in the decision maker’s seat to see if “stick” and “carrot” plans actually reflected different underlying attitudes. Participants who showed high levels of bias against overweight people were more likely to choose the “stick” plan, but provided different justification depending on whether their bias was explicit or implicit:
“Participants who explicitly disliked overweight people were forthcoming about their decision, admitting that they chose a ‘stick’ policy on the basis of personal attitudes,” noted Tannenbaum. “Participants who implicitly disliked overweight people, in contrast, justified their decisions based on the most economical course of action.”
Ironically, if they were truly focused on economic concerns they should have opted for the “carrot” plan, since it would save the company $100 per employee. Instead, these participants tended to choose the strategy that effectively punished overweight people, even in instances when the “stick” policy implied a financial cost to the company.
Tannenbaum concludes that these framing effects may have important consequences across many different real-world domains:
“In a broad sense, our research affects policymakers at large,” says Tannenbaum. “Logically equivalent policies in various domains — such as setting a default option for organ donation or retirement savings — can communicate very different messages, and understanding the nature of these messages could help policymakers craft more effective policy.”
Source: Association for Psychological Science
Word collage of healthcare photo by shutterstock.
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