We all experience some kind of uncomfortable situations, such as getting fired from a job, being late for some important event or being bullied at school. However, overtime this kind of embarrassment tends to fade away and people can recall such experiences without re-experiencing the emotional charge. Nevertheless, a new study has shown that this doesn’t seem to be the case for people who experience insomnia. In fact, insomnia can disrupt the brain’s processing of emotional experience and overwhelm people with emotionally charged memories.

It is commonly believed that insomnia is caused by over thinking and bad habits, but many scientists think that biological factors can also be the culprit. There have been gene studies which have demonstrated that there are genetic factors that make people susceptible to insomnia. These insomnia risk genes are located in the limbic area of the brain, which is the exact location where the processing of emotion occurs.

Therefore, researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam decided to take a closer look at the possibility that insomnia has to do with disturbed emotion processing. Rick Wassing and his colleagues have realized that people who have insomnia don’t experience the same overnight resolution of emotional distress as normal sleepers. In fact, they have discovered that insomniacs could relieve and experience emotional distress resulting from an unpleasant situation for over a week.

Insomniacs usually have a fragmented REM sleep, which is a result of insomnia where an area of the brain is not completely deactivated during sleep and prompts the continuing secretion of neuro chemicals associated with alertness. Consequently, insomniacs experience a connection between the storage of long-term emotional memories and the limbic system, which results in emotional charge.

Hence, the researchers decided to have a look into the responses of normal sleepers and insomniacs to novel emotional experiences and memories of past emotional experiences and then compare them. There were 57 participants, aged 18 to 70 years, out of which 27 were insomniacs. All of the participants underwent two tests, one involving measurement of participants’ reactions to a novel shameful experience and the other involved recall of five shameful events from the distant past.

So, analyzing the data showed the research team that all participants had the same response to novel neutral and novel emotional experiences. However, insomniacs had a stronger response to relived shameful memories than to neutral memories than normal sleepers.

Additionally, the researchers found out the people who suffered from insomnia while recalling memories of past shameful experiences induced a limbic response. Hence, normal sleepers and insomniacs have different brain circuit while reliving emotional memories from the distant past as compared to when they are exposed to novel emotional experiences.

The restless and fragmented REM sleep, which is characteristic of insomnia, might be a result of a failure to deactivate a part of the brain, which, if shut down, could provide a restorative sleep and quicker recovery from emotionally painful experiences. Nevertheless, insomnia can be successfully treated behaviorally, but more research is needed to find a cure for this condition.