Emotion Regulation and Sleep in Adolescents
Cranky in the morning? Sufficient sleep is necessary for control of emotions.
Emotion regulation is often challenging for adolescents.
Poor sleep can impair people's ability to control their emotions.
Physiological mechanisms underlying sleep and emotional control have been discovered.
Every time I talk about how sleep is important for child and adolescent development; any audience can relate to how they feel and function when their sleep is of insufficient duration and quality. A common experience for all of us is to feel “out of sorts” after too little sleep or a bad night’s sleep. We are often more irritable than usual, and researchers infer that such behavior is due to emotional dysregulation.
Adolescence is a time of rapid changes in body, emotions, and behavior, and sleep researchers have demonstrated empirically that poor sleep can amplify negative emotions and affect their control. The implications extend to family relations, adjustment and performance at school, and all too often, mental health problems.
Understanding what underlies the relationship between sleep and emotion regulation has been a scientific goal for decades, and advances in technology have accelerated research. One of my favorite studies is one reported in 2007 in Current Biology, “The Human Emotional Brain Without Sleep—A Prefrontal Amygdala Disconnect” (Yoo et al., 2007). In that experimental study, adults were sleep-deprived and then underwent fMRI scans. They concluded that when people were sleep deprived, the parts of their brains associated with emotions—the limbic system and, specifically, the amygdala—had an amplified response.
Moreover, there were fewer signs of connectivity between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex, which is often engaged to regulate intense emotions. Typically, an aroused limbic system is calmed down both during waking hours and during sleep. But when the subjects were sleep-deprived, their emotions were poorly controlled.
While fewer studies have been done with children, those that have been done show similar results. In a 2016 study done at Emory University, researchers found that children whose sleep was shorter showed weaker connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. A 2018 review in Sleep Medicine Reviews summarizes this line of research with children and adolescents. Another review published in 2020 looked at how sleep affects brain processes that can be the precursors of later anxiety and depression in adolescents.
We now are beginning to understand some of the physiological mechanisms that underlie the link between poor sleep and adolescents’ emotions. Emotion dysregulation is challenging for adolescents, for their parents and teachers, and for their social relations with peers. The take-home message, though, is the same one that we sleep researchers have known for a long time: Sleep of sufficient duration, quality, and regularity is critical for many aspects of adolescents’ daily lives.
Joseph A. Buckhalt, Ph.D.,
