Key Facts: 1. Neurochemical Activity During Sleep: Inactivity of serotonin and noradrenaline during REM sleep is vital for processing emotional memories, allowing the brain to handle emotional information without the usual ‘fight or flight’ response.
Key Facts: 2. Brain Regions Involved: The hippocampus stores new data daily, while the amygdala, active during emotional experiences, works with the hippocampus during sleep to reorganize these memories.
Key Facts: 3. Implications for Sleep Disorders: Disrupted REM sleep, common in sleep disorders, may prevent this necessary processing, increasing the risk of mental health issues and highlighting the need for effective sleep therapies.
So, where to now? “We know that with insomnia or other sleep disorders where people wake up from sleep a lot, we see an increased risk of developing mental health problems.
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Making ‘good sleepers’
“Our hypothesis would be that that these awakenings from sleep lead to the fact that the noradrenergic system is not shut down for long periods of time (in fact, they might actually show enhanced activity) and that’s why these people might not be able to regulate emotional memories.”
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The solution is to try to get a good night’s sleep, yes, but the problem is how then do we do that? We know that two out of three people with insomnia benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI) but that is mostly based on subjective ratings.
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“There’s less evidence on objective sleep measures. The insomnia patient after CBTI is not necessarily a good sleeping individual, they still have some sleep disturbances but CBTI is enabling them to better deal with them.”
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“We need to critically think more about the mechanisms that regulate sleep. It’s very hard to target one system because sleep is very dynamic—the noradrenergic system shuts down during REM sleep, but it actually needs to be active during non-REM sleep so you can’t just turn it off for the entire sleep cycle.”
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“We need really creative ideas about how to design an intervention or a drug that can target these dynamics that happen during sleep and enable those systems to renormalize. We need to be targeting objective sleep and making people with insomnia good sleepers again.”
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