How Being Sleep-Deprived Makes the World Seem Threatening
When you are deprived of sleep, your perceived world becomes more threatening.
This is because, when you don't get enough sleep, you are more likely to misread other's faces and interpret them negatively.
Your perceived world becomes less friendly.
There is a special part of the brain solely devoted to reading and interpreting faces.
During REM sleep (dreaming), this area is calibrated and fine-tuned. Lack of sleep compromises this function.
Even one night of poor sleep can cause us to misinterpret others.
An experiment was done to determine how sleep-deprived people read and interpret faces.
The volunteers in the study were shown images of people with different expressions along a continuum from friendly to menacing.
When sleep-deprived, the ability to read faces was jeopardized.
Sleep-deprived people could not easily distinguish between a friendly face and a neutral one.
The experiment also revealed that when sleep-deprived, mild and neutral expressions were interpreted as menacing.
It seems there is a built-in bias: when in doubt, interpret others through a lens of fear.
Consider the implications of this in the world.
One-third of the population is sleep-deprived.
That one-third is more prone to misinterpret others' intentions as more threatening than they really are.
This is a severe handicap in a world where interpreting others is essential to emotional intelligence.
How does this play out in the work world?
What happens to team collaboration when sleep-deprived individuals mistakenly read negativity in a colleague where none exists?
There are shift-work jobs that involve reacting to facial expressions. For example, police officers need to make split-second decisions based on their reading of a person's degree of threat. Shift workers are chronically sleep-deprived.
There is an invisible glue that holds us all together in society.
That glue depends on underlying trust for each other.