Ample rest or enough sleep has always been a healer for many conditions. If you were up all night and you body starts to ache the next morning then lack of sleep the night before could be the culprit. According to a new research, loss of rest leads to a double whammy to the brain and guarantees a greater levels of body pain.
Study author, Adam Krause, a Ph.D candidate with the centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley said, “Activity in the somatosensory cortex, previously associated with the location and intensity of pain, was enhanced following sleep loss”. Krause added, “in two regions called the striatum and the insula, sleep deprivation decreased the activity associated with pain [relief]”. The study author added that those regions control the release of Dopamine which is often called as the “feel-good” hormone.
For the study 25 your participants got the normal eight hours of rest one night and a week later the same participants were made to go through a night of no sleep what so ever. After every session, the participants of the study were made to undergo “thermal pain sensitivity” tests and was followed by MRI scans that monitored brain activity when their legs were exposed to uncomfortable levels of heat. After the participants had gone through a full night of rest, most of the participants reported feeling heat discomfort at about 111 degrees Fahrenheit.
But after the participants were made to go through a night full of no rest, the pain sensitivity dropped to 107 degrees F. The brain scans had pinpointed the neurological basis for the change in the pain sensitivity after lack of rest. The research team had later studied 60 adults with an average age of 38 in a 48 hour survey period. All of them had reported pain during the survey period and were all asked to maintain sleep diaries, report mood and anxiety levels and rank pain sensitivity. The focus of the study was to encourage rest as a treatment and also improve conditions of sleep.
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