Iimmediate emotional reactions

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When someone is struggling with sleep debt — the cumulative effect of not getting enough sleep — they’re more likely to see a negative impact on performance for tasks related to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for executive functions. These tasks include the regulation of problem solving, reasoning, and processing emotion—which is crucial to empathy. Sleep debt levies a particularly acute hit on emotional regulation. It not only disturbs the effective functioning of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, but it also reduces the functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala region of the brain, as well as wrecks havoc on the amygdala itself.



The amygdala is the emotional rapid response center of the brain dominican republic cell phone number list that controls many of our. Sleep debt causes the amygdala to go into overdrive, causing us to be more intensely reactive to situations. As sleep clinician Michael J. Breus describes it, the prefrontal cortex “puts the breaks on impulsiveness,” acting as “a traffic cop for our emotions.” When you don’t meet your sleep need and this connection between these two regions of the brain is hampered, we become more impulsive and less thoughtful in our emotional responses.



How Lack of Sleep Makes It Hard to Be Empathetic Current theories of empathy hold that there are two main components: Cognitive empathy refers to the ability simply to understand another person’s feelings and state of mind. This underpins a seller’s capacity to predict a client’s behavior and intuit when they’re withholding information. Emotional empathy, on the other hand, occurs when you go beyond mere understanding of another person’s feelings to vicariously sharing in them.