Sleep Abyss

Who hasn’t found themselves awake in the dead of night, staring into the dark, our personal troubles feeling exponentially sharper and utterly catastrophic.

You know how it goes, in the silence of the night, our thoughts, already a little burdened, begin a relentless, psychological siege. But wait…there is a culprit! 

The core culprit is the ‘circadian nadir’. IKR…The say-what-now? This is the point when your core body's temperature hits its lowest level, and, crucially, your psychological vulnerability peaks. 

During late-night hours, our key cognitive tools are deactivated. In short, our executive function goes on strike! The network (or more accurately task positive network) houses our executive function, used for rational problem-solving and self-regulation, is naturally impaired (not to mention also severely eroded by sleep loss, note…caffeine, alcohol etc. not helping either). 

Meaning the circuits we need for cognitive clarity and emotional resilience are temporarily compromised and our poor brain's ability to regulate impulses falters, leaving us vulnerable to emotional overwhelm. 

In short, difficult personal experiences stop being problems to be solved and become insurmountable, painful realities. This gives the amygdala the keys to our brain treasures and as sleep deprivation mounts, the emotional centres of the brain undergo a destabilising shift. 

Then we become hyper-reactive and primed for fear and anxiety. (curtains become monsters, noises become burglars, sticks become snakes and such). The result is a brain primed for catastrophising thoughts, unable to manage the fear of bad things that might come true, we magnify any negative feelings already present.

Usually, emotional turmoil surges between midnight and 4am and as a long night wears on, mounting sleep pressure can cause the brain to slip in and out of the lightest stages of sleep. Typically we are unaware of these brief transitions, but the effects on our perception can be profound. When our sleep is highly fragmented like this, we sometimes get those incredibly vivid sensory experiences as dream fragments bleed into consciousness, blurring the boundary between thoughts and reality (aka: hypnagogic hallucinations). I guarantee like me, you've had these wired, wierd and sometimes worrisome experiences right!

Fortunately, (deep exhale) this psychological abyss is only temporary. As the first hints of the morning light appear, the brain begins a process of neurobiological recovery. The circadian rhythm nudges the brain toward arousal and the network starts to reassert itself, rebooting and restoring access to the cognitive tools necessary for perspective and problem-solving.

Those emotions that felt overwhelmingly catastrophic in the dark become more manageable with the break of day. 

So next time you wake up in the middle of the night and your problems feel like an apocalypse, try to remember it is not you, it's your brain's faulty night shift, and a highly predictable, neurobiological phenomenon! Sleep tight!