Did you know that sleepless nights can lead to selfish behavior?.

Sleep is widely recognized as one of life’s essential processes, providing powerful benefits in physical health, mental health and even mortality.Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted three studies looking at this “selfish” effect, analyzing changes in neural activity and behavior benefiting others, and found it was prevalent even after a small loss of sleep.

Research scientist Eti Ben Simon and Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and director of the university’s Center for Human Sleep Science, were the study leads. They say this finding was most surprising.
“Even just an hour of sleep loss was more than enough to influence the choice to help another,” said Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow of psychology at the Center for Human Sleep Science. “When people lose one hour of sleep, there’s a clear hit on our innate human kindness and our motivation to help other people in need.”

By looking at a database of 3 million charitable donations between 2001 and 2016, Ben Simon, Walker and their colleagues saw a 10% drop in donations following Daylight Saving Time. In the second study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brain activity of 24 people after eight hours of sleep and after a night of no sleep. The prosocial neural network — the areas of the brain associated with theory of mind — was less active after sleep deprivation.
“Sleep has been consistently shown to affect our mood and our cognitive functioning, and thus, it also likely affects how we relate to others,” said Dr. Ivana Rosenzweig, a sleep physician and consultant neuropsychiatrist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital.

In the third study, which measured the sleep of more than 100 people across three to four nights, researchers unexpectedly found that quality of sleep was more important than the quantity of sleep when it came to measuring selfishness. The team assessed levels of selfishness based on responses to questionnaires that had been completed by study participants. Sleep quantity and quality both typically influence emotional and social behavior, so the team was expecting to find an effect from both, Ben Simon explained.
“These findings could suggest that once sleep duration rises above some basic nominal amount, then it appears to be the quality of that sleep that is most critical for aiding and supporting our desire to help other people,” she explained.

More than half of all people in developed countries say they get insufficient sleep during the work week, which Walker calls a “global sleep-loss epidemic.” Extensive research has already shown links to mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression, as well as physical ailments such as diabetes and obesity.
“(Sleep loss) radically alters how we are as social, emotional beings, which you could argue is the very essence of human interaction and what it means to live a fulfilling, meaningful human existence,” Walker said.

Article By Suzy Nyongesa.