Around midnight, the world can once in a while feel like a dim spot. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of flooding your mind, and when you wake up, staring at the ceiling, you begin to crave guilty pleasures, like cigarettes or carbohydrate foods.
A lot of evidence suggests that the human brain works differently if it’s awake at night. At midnight, negative emotions command our attention more than positive emotions, dangerous thoughts increase in appeal and inhibitions disappear.
Some researchers believe that the human circadian rhythm is heavily involved in these important changes in function, as they summarize in a new paper how brain systems work differently after dark.
His hypothesis, called the ‘Mind of Midnight’, suggests that the human body and human brain follow a natural 24-hour cycle of activity that affects our emotions and behavior. In short, at certain times, our species are predisposed to feel and act in certain ways.
During the day, for example, molecular level and brain activity are aligned to wakefulness. But our normal behavior at night is to sleep.
From an evolutionary perspective this, of course, makes sense. Humans are much more efficient at hunting and gathering in daylight, and when night time is great for rest, humans were once more vulnerable to becoming prey.
According to the researchers, our attention to negative stimuli increases dramatically at night to cope with this increased risk. Where it might once have helped us jump out of hidden dangers, this increased focus on the negative can then feed into an altered reward/motivation system, predisposing a person to particularly risky behaviors.
Add lack of sleep to the equation, and this state of consciousness only becomes more problematic. “There are millions of people who wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s pretty good evidence that their brains aren’t working during the day,” says Elizabeth Kellerman, a neurologist at Harvard University.
“I demand that more examination be finished on this, as it influences their wellbeing and security as well as the strength of others.”
The creators of the new speculation utilize two guides to represent their point. The first example is a heroin user who successfully controls his cravings during the day but succumbs to his cravings at night.
The second is of a college student struggling with insomnia, who begins to feel hopeless, lonely, and hopeless as the sleepless nights pile up. Both scenarios can ultimately prove fatal. Self destruction and self-hurt are extremely normal around evening time.
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In fact, some research suggests three times the risk of suicide between midnight and 6:00 a.m. than any other time of day. A 2020 study concluded that night awakenings are a risk factor for suicide, “possibly through circadian rhythm misalignment.”
“Self destruction, already puzzling, arises as a departure from forlornness and agony, and before the expenses of self destruction are thought of, the understudy has obtained the endlessly means to act in such a period. Ready when no one is awake to stop them,” the authors of The ‘brain after midnight’ hypothesis explains.
People also take more illegal or dangerous substances at night. In 2020, a study at a supervised drug abuse center in Brazil revealed a 4.7-fold increased risk of nighttime opioid overdose.
Some of these behaviors can be explained by sleep debt or the cover of darkness, but there are probably nocturnal neural changes as well. Researchers like Kellerman and her colleagues believe we need to investigate these factors more to make sure we’re protecting those most at risk from nighttime waking.
Until this point, the creators say, no investigations have inspected what lack of sleep and circadian timing mean for an individual’s prize handling.
Thus, we don’t really know how shift workers, like pilots or doctors, are coping with their unusual sleep routines. For six hours a day or so, we know surprisingly little about how the human brain works. Whether asleep or awake, the mind after midnight is a mystery.
