Role of sleep in "unwanted thoughts"
/If you're struggling to keep negative thoughts out of your head, it could be because of your sleep habits.
This is what a new study (link below) from the University of York demonstrated:
The study found that a "lack of sufficient sleep significantly impairs our ability to keep unwanted and unpleasant thoughts from entering our mind".
In fact, they found that people who didn't get really good sleep suffered from negative thoughts 50% more than people who were well rested.
Not only that: the "rested" group were able to cope with negative thoughts easily - gradually letting them go.
Whereas the "sleep deprived" group didn't just have more negative thoughts: those thoughts affected their stress levels, their sweat rates, and the techniques used by therapists to help people deal with negative thoughts didn't work as well.
This is key not just for dealing with disorders (like trauma, PTSD, anxiety, etc), but also for everyday life.
I've always harped on sleep being the "number 1" biohack - when you don't get enough sleep, it isn't just your brain's ability to deal with negative thoughts that gets impacted:
- Your ability to retain memories drops significantly
- Your ability to recover from workouts also drops
- Your ability to rebalance your hormones gets disrupted (making weight loss much harder)
- Your nervous system gets affected (you'll be less productive at work)
I've written a few articles about sleep in the past, including:
- Tips to improve sleep quality
