We  have all seen some bad behavior and poor decisions made by our young kids and chalked it up to their being cranky due to a lack of sleep.  Can the same be said of adults, co-workers, bosses?  Perhaps.The Huffington Post reports on the results of a new small study that shows that a lack of sleep may alter a person’s ability to process emotions and keep them in check.

Israeli researchers found that exhaustion caused participants to overreact to every day challenges that they would have normally taken in stride, had they been more rested.

Participants were shown images and had their brain activity monitored after they had been awake for 24 hours and again after a restful night. The participants showed high levels of activity in the area of the brain that processes emotion, in response to the neutral and the unpleasant images after they had been deprived of sleep. They also had strong activity when shown the unpleasant images after a night of good sleep but did not have an emotional response in the brain when looking at the neutral images.

The results also showed that hyper-emotional reactions were linked to less rapid eye movement during sleep and that sleep deprivation may also be associated with anxiety. (Huffington Post)

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