LENGKONG, AYOBANDUNG.COM – Problem lack of sleep not only makes you feel tired faster. There are various other negative effects that need to be aware of unhealthy sleep patterns.
Research has shown that lack of sleep associated with improvement risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. In the new study, researchers are already investigating the effects lack of sleep on the participant’s ability to focus.
Reporting from Medical Xpress, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia, researchers assessed 23 people with chronic insomnia and 23 people without difficulty sleeping (controls). They stay in the sleep laboratory overnight and researchers give them attention tests at night.
“We asked participants to focus on the circle of letters in the middle of the computer screen. They must reach the target letter (X or N) as quickly and accurately as possible while ignoring the annoying letters that appear outside the circle,” said David James Robertson, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Strathclyde. who is also the author of the study on The Conversation.
“Those with insomnia found it more difficult to focus on tasks and ignore distractions than the control group who slept well,” he said later.
Quoted from Suara.com (Ayobandung.com network), researchers also assessed whether the lack of focus on insomniacs might be due to a decrease in the effectiveness of the attention mechanism.
Says Robertson, “To test this, we used a well-established attention task in which we manipulated how challenging the task was.”
Research has shown that when you focus on easy tasks, your brain automatically processes distractions. However, it is different when focusing on a difficult task, all brain power is used up by the task at hand and the distraction is eliminated from our consciousness.
“We found that the attention mechanism appeared to work properly in those with insomnia. However, people with the condition showed higher rates of basic attention disorder,” he added.
The researcher then emphasized that there is a possibility lack of sleep can reduce the brain’s ability to properly decide which stimuli to pay attention to. It is also important to note that disruption to frontal cognitive processes can make monotonous tasks such as driving on familiar routes more difficult and dangerous.
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