A good night’s sleep is essential to keep one’s body and mind healthy. Not having a proper sleeping pattern can lead to several health-related issues.
And, according to new research, sleepless nights can lead to selfish behaviour. You, you read that right. The research published in the journal PLOS Biology stated that insufficient sleep affects how a person is likely to help others.
Conducted by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, the study noted that even one hour loss of sleep affected people’s behaviour towards helping someone.
“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,” she added.
Three different studies were conducted to analyse the effect of sleep loss on behaviour benefiting others. The researchers also noted that both quantity and quality of sleep influence a person’s emotional and social behaviour.
“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,” Ben Simon explained.
“(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,” Matthew Walker, co-lead of the research, said.
Loss of sleep has also been linked to mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety, and physical ailments such as obesity.
Source: indiatoday.in
