Science has revealed why you struggle to sleep in a new place.
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The researchers proceeded to monitor the brain activity of the participants while they were subjected to a hearing test. A continuous tone was played as the students slept, then a single beep of a different tone was emitted.
The study in Current Biology explains what underlies the “first-night effect”, a phenomenon that poses an inconvenience to business travelers and sleep researchers alike. The participants did not report having any anxiety over the surveys, and were screened to ensure their sleep quality was typically normal.
“It is possible, for example, that frequent travellers might adapt to this first night effect over time”, Finan, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. This is because if a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. The results showed that during the first night, the left hemisphere of the brain was more active during deep sleep (or “slow-wave sleep”) than the right hemisphere. And they found that students woke up faster when the sound was played into the right ear, which is connected to the left side of the brain.
Although the researchers didn’t determine why the left hemisphere showed an increase in vigilance during slow-wave sleep, they propose two possibilities. On the first occasion, their left hemispheres responded more strongly to the sounds than a week later.
“Slow-wave sleep is the deepest sleep where arousal threshold is the highest, meaning it is more hard to wake people up from slow-wave sleep than in lighter sleep”, said Tamaki.
Over the course of three experiments on 35 young, healthy volunteers, researchers measured brain activity during two consecutive nights of slumber.
When the experiment was repeated on the second night, the differences in brain activity were not significantly different, not even in the network that indicated activity the night before.
“When we feel at risk of danger, our neurological systems, bodies, and moods react defensively on-guard to protect one with a response from fight or flight (running away), depression, anger and attack, and even a dissociative out-of-body experience”, she told Medical Daily. “But if you stay for a few days at the same place, your sleep might catch up”. Panic and feelings of anxiety can be ticked off by sound, temperature, feeling of mood in the room, space, a noise, or a memory.
But Sasaki wanted to know what was going on in the brain during that first night.
When you sleep in a new place, a part of your brain remains alert for potential threats, a new study finds. Tamaki suggests this could also be used as an insomnia model for further research.
In other words, humans are more similar to an animals sleeping habit than you may think.
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The findings don’t rule out the possibility that other intrinsic networks may also stay partially active at night, particularly the subcortical circuits that help regulate sleep and wakefulness.
