Interrupted Sleep Affects Your Mental And Cognitive Health

Using brain scans researchers have revealed that sleep inertia can cause reduced cognitive performance. In other words, it can hinder your brain functions by lowering your comprehension skills which increases the time it takes for you to react to the world around you. Sleep inertia occurs when you enter deep sleep but wake up before finishing the sleep cycle. To study its affects, the researchers followed 34 participants. They measured their brain activities before and after a 45 minute nap. The results showed that cognitive performance decreased soon after waking up. Those who awakened from a deeper sleep experienced bigger drops in performance, showing diminished short term memory, counting skills and thinking abilities. However, this drop lasted only for 25 minutes after waking up.
This drop in brain performance during sleep inertia was linked with increased delta brainwave activity, which is recorded with an electroencephalogram (EEG) during deep sleep. The team also found that working connectivity between brain networks received the biggest disruption right after awakening from the nap. It is known that it takes 25 to 30 minutes to reach deep sleep. Therefore scientists recommend taking naps that are shorter than 25 minutes or full 90-minutes naps to complete the sleep cycle. Neutralizing , or at least limiting, the effects of sleep inertia is possible but little is known about the subject matter making it more of a hit and miss process for instance, ingesting caffeine before napping can limit the effects of sleep inertia but the mechanism that control that behavior are still unknown.
Our body goes into maintenance mode when we go to sleep, this helps our body to recover and repair cells and other functions. This maintenance mode breaks down when your sleep gets interrupted. Therefore, it is better to wake up at the end of a sleep stage rather than the middle. But beware that using a regular alarm clock to wake up every morning can increase your chances of experiencing sleep inertia by up to 90%, alarms clock can’t tell what stage of sleep your body is in and they have a 45% chance of waking you up from REM or deep sleep, with a 49% chance of waking you up from non REM sleep, leaving only a small chance that a standard alarm clock will wake you up during the optimal moment of the sleep stage. The team found that cognitive skills of participants in the study slightly deteriorated after waking up rather than after being deprived of sleep for an extended period of time.

By-Abhishek Singh
Content – https://youtu.be/1bIlJb_EOTE