This is the simple key to reducing your coronavirus anxiety levels

The novel coronavirus has elevated virtually every element of ecology. As elected officials delineate over potential relief efforts the rest of us await academic consensus. 

The latest, from the Journal of Nature Human Behavior, stresses the importance of sleep against the prevention of anxiety. 

“Poor sleep and anxiety are intimately linked. When we are anxious our sleep is disturbed and when our sleep is disturbed we become anxious. It is a vicious cycle that we now know can start from poor sleep,” explained study author Eti Ben Simon, a neuroscientist and a sleep researcher at The Center for Human Sleep Science.

A clear head and quality rest are two integral elements of immunisation that happen to share a mutualistic relationship. 

Panic makes us negligent, while concurrently weakening our immune system. Identically, insufficient sleep spikes anxiety while facilitating comparable damage to the very same biomechanisms. 

In the wake of COVID-19’s communal degradation, health officials appear to be dividing their time between tempering hysteria and lengthening preemptive health measures.

“Getting enough sleep can help protect you against all kinds of common infections and viruses. Sleep strengthens your body’s capacity to fight off pathogens of all kinds. We need all the help we can get in fighting this coronavirus outbreak,” said Behavioral Neuroscientist, Patrick McNamara.

More broadly, as revealed by the new study, individuals who suffer from chronic insomnia are twice as likely to develop an anxiety disorder. The correlations were murky up until very recently.

Realigning bio-defenses 

Prolonged sleep deprivation contributes to reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula.

Among a wealth of other adverse consequences, this deficit increases one’s risk of developing psychological conditions over time. However, dramatic surges in anxiety levels induced by these changes are observable the very next day. 

By employing functional magnetic resonance imaging machines the researchers were able to analyse the brain activity of the 18 participants involved in the new report. 

Each volunteer was asked to view emotionally-charged video footage after a full night of sleep, and again after 24 hours of collective sleep deprivation. All the while, these individuals were tasked with rating their anxiety levels in the evenings and mornings.

After being awake for 24 hours, 50 per cent of the study pool reported levels of anxiety that exceeded the clinical threshold for anxiety disorders.

“Our findings point to an immediate impact of sleep loss, as well as poor sleep, on anxiety levels the very next morning. That is, lack of sleep is a causal trigger that instigates anxiety, even after just one night,” Simon told PsyPost.

“Even modest night-to-night reductions in sleep across the population predict consequential day-to-day increases in anxiety. These findings help contribute to an emerging framework explaining the intimate link between sleep and anxiety and further highlight the prospect of non-rapid eye movement sleep as a therapeutic target for meaningfully reducing anxiety.”

Medical austerity is our best shot at realigning our bio defenses. Sleep is the most influential factor. Every important somatic and psychological function is wounded and boltered by both sleep quality and duration.  

The new study titled Overanxious and underslept, was co-authored by Eti Ben Simon, Aubrey Rossi, Allison G. Harvey and  Matthew P. Walker. 

This article was written by CW Headley and originally published by The Ladders.