Have you ever stayed up all night to finish a school assignment? Or sat down to a movie a little too late at night, knowing you were going to stay up well past midnight?
Perhaps you have stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, because you have been texting someone you were a little extra fond of?
– Can change us
If so, you should get the so-called “Mind after midnight” theory, which was recently described in the scientific journal Frontiers in Network Psychology.
The hypothesis is that changes occur in our brain when we are awake while our biological clock thinks it is night, which for the vast majority of people will be around midnight.
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The researchers believe that these changes can change the way we deal with the world around us, especially with regard to our reward system, impulse control and processing of information.
Elizabeth Klermann is the lead author of the study. She is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, and also works in the neurology department at Massachusetts General Hospital.
– A prayer for researchers
Klermann and her team have gone through data collected during the biological night, when our bodies are supposed to sleep.
They have also used data from people who have been sleepless throughout the night.
– The basic idea is that the internal, biological circadian rhythm is set towards processes that promote sleep after midnight – and not being awake, says Klermann in a blog post at Mass General Research Institute.
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She believes that the results of the new study indicate that researchers should study this phenomenon more closely.
– There are millions of people who are awake in the middle of the night, and there is pretty good evidence that their brains don’t work as well as they do during the day. Now I have a prayer that scientists will look into it, because people’s health and safety will be affected, she says.
Greater danger at night
Klermann and her team refer to several previous studies, which have revealed that there is a greater risk of people committing harmful or violent acts at night.
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Among other things, it should be more common for murders and violent crimes to be committed at night. The same applies to the risk of illegal use of various substances such as cannabis, alcohol or opioids.
– What we eat at night is also often more unhealthy, as we go for carbohydrates, fats and processed food – and often consume more calories than we need, write the researchers.
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According to Klermann, our natural circadian rhythm has an impact on the neuroactivity in the brain. Changes in the circadian rhythm can lead to changes in how we process impressions and react to the world around us.
Dangerous decisions
She explains that we as humans tend to look at information more positively in the morning – and more negatively at night.
This must be because our biological clock is then set to sleep.
According to the researchers, the fact that we are awake after midnight can simply lead to us making poorer – and sometimes also more dangerous – decisions.
In addition, our body makes more of the signaling substance dopamine at night, which can change our motivational system so that there is a greater risk of us behaving in a risky way.
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The researchers believe that this can have a direct impact not only on the decisions we make, but also on how we function and prioritize.
– The simplest solution would be to help vulnerable individuals sleep through the night, thereby reducing exposure to the times that are associated with increased risk, the researchers write.
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