Although many of us like to stay up at night, it has been proven by decades of research that our brains actually work completely differently during these hours. In fact, since your brain is more inclined to make instant decisions at night, shopping platforms have developed and implemented tactics to take advantage of this.
So, how does staying up in the middle of the night affect our health and behavior? New research published in Frontiers in Network Psychology has provided the most up-to-date answer to this question. Scientists have presented evidence of how our brains behave differently at night.
Being awake at night is simply not in our nature:
According to the new hypothesis of scientists, activities that affect our emotions and behaviors occur in the human body and mind for 24 hours. Our brain makes us feel in certain ways at certain times without our being aware of it. Due to our nature, this natural process at night consists of activities based on our sleep.
These nighttime activities are actually based on thousands of years of evolution. As a species that could hunt during the day, humans slept defenselessly at night. But according to scientists, our body was exposed to negative stimuli during sleep so that we would be on the alert for any danger.
Although these negative stimuli enabled us to wake up in times of danger in the past, they now lead to a different outcome as we are not hunters today. Stimulants feed off the reward/motivation system at night, which can predispose the person to risky behaviors. In addition, the sleep loss that comes with staying up at night negatively affects the brain activities that occur naturally during the day.
Moreover, these negative feelings of staying up at night also affect suicide rates in the world. To prove this, previous research has shown that suicidal tendencies increase 3 times between midnight and 6 am compared to all other times.
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