Here’s yet another reason to get a good night’s sleep before the big salary negotiation, or before you sit down for a difficult conversation with a colleague: Lack of sleep makes the emotional centers of your brain over-reactive.

And not just a little over-reactive. A lot.

Even the group of researchers from University of California at Berkeley were surprised by the degree of over-reaction, reported recently in the journal Current Biology and outlined in Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains:

“‘While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,’ Walker said. ‘They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.’”

Neuroscientist Walker also commented that when we’re sleep deprived, we seem actually to regress in terms of control over our emotions.

Found via Lifehacker.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Photo credit: Daniel Deak Bardos