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Sleep is a Foundation of Resilience

A woman stretching her arms as she wakes up in a bright, serene bedroom.

Sleep is one of the foundations for resilience.

Restful, restorative sleep has been shown to increase resilience, making it easier to cope with stress and regulate our emotions. Sleep even affects how well your brain adapts and how you process emotions.

More specifically, your brain cleans house while you are sleeping. During sleep, the metabolic activity of your brain goes up about 10 times. Research shows that neurons in the brain actually shrink by about 60% to make room for the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through the brain, which removes toxins and delivers oxygen and nutrients.

This cleanup function strengthens and recharges your brain’s capacity for resilience, helping you adapt and change by building new connections, which enhances your ability to regulate your emotions and behavior.

Sleep deprivation compromises your ability to focus, connect, and make thoughtful decisions. Resilience requires energy, and poor sleep depletes your energy reserves.

When you don’t get enough sleep, minor day-to-day stressors like coping with work pressure or relationship hiccups can feel more overwhelming. Simply put, when you are physically exhausted, you have less capacity for resilience.

How Sleep Makes You More Resilient

Sleep helps to enhance mental strength and resilience. This is one reason it may feel easier to respond to life’s difficult times when you are rested.

Research shows that sleep enhances cognitive function. A study at UCLA has shown that sleep deprivation negatively affects brain maintenance and repair, compromising mental acuity and optimal brain activity. This impacts your ability to focus, slows your reaction time, compromises your ability to make decisions, multitask, and store new memories.

The Better Sleep Council found that 79% of people would feel better and more prepared for the day with an extra hour of sleep. Sleeping only 6-7 hours, you are twice as likely to be involved in a car crash, and sleeping less than 5 hours increases your risk 4-5 times.

Additional research has found that sleep continuity is essential for memory consolidation. This study found that during restorative sleep, important memories are consolidated and creativity is boosted.

Sleep also appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, supporting healthy levels of mood-supporting hormones, including serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol, which affect our tools of resilience —our thoughts, mood, and energy.

Your Prefrontal Cortex Needs Sleep to Function

Research correlates poor sleep with diminished function of the prefrontal cortex and finds “the prefrontal cortex is disproportionately negatively influenced when an individual is low in sleep quantity or experiences poor sleep quality.”

Your prefrontal cortex is foundational to resilience. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain located behind your forehead, supports not only your “executive function” and your ability to organize, plan, and make decisions, but also your emotional intelligence and your ability to understand, engage in self-control, and manage your emotional response.

Research on emotion and the prefrontal cortex finds that “the prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in the generation and regulation of emotion.” In other words, this region of the brain needs healthy stimulation and blood flow to support healthy emotional regulation and value-based decision-making, including the following nine emotionally supportive aspects of the prefrontal cortex identified by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his 2007 book, The Mindful Brain.

When you are short on sleep, you have less glucose available to fuel the prefrontal cortex, which enhances your resilience in handling both expected and unexpected challenges of daily life.

Neurophysiological research indicates that resilience and self-regulation rely disproportionately on the prefrontal cortex to calm the amygdala (which controls our perception of threat) regions of the brain.

Poor Sleep = Poor Glucose for Prefrontal Cortex Function = Compromised Resilience

According to the study, “Glucose fuels such brain activity in general and has been linked specifically to self-regulation. Data indicate that decrements in glucose impair self-regulation, and restoring glucose restores self-regulation. Brain glucose is utilized throughout the day and replenished during sleep, as evidenced by neuro-imagery delineating a decrease in cerebral metabolism during sleep deprivation. Indeed, sleep difficulties have been clearly linked with decrements in activity in the prefrontal cortex.”

Resilience and self-regulation rely disproportionately on the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. If the prefrontal cortex is lacking energy and cannot suppress the amygdala’s perception of threat, your ability to tap into higher cognitive functions and resilience is compromised.

READ THIS NEXT: Emotional Intelligence and the Prefrontal Cortex

Poor sleep reduces connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, resulting in lapses in attention, inadequate risk assessment, and analysis and management (critical for self-regulation as you choose among alternative strategies for goal-directed action). The study noted that “avoiding choices where risks are disproportionately higher than rewards requires utilizing the prefrontal cortex.”

The study continued that:

“The amygdala and prefrontal cortex are centrally involved in regulating affect and are disproportionately negatively influenced by low levels of sleep and poor quality sleep. Moreover, actively regulating one’s own affect requires continual effort and energy, which can be exhausting. It is reasonable to expect that those who are low in sleep quantity or are experiencing poor sleep quality will not have the energy to engage in such emotional regulation, and will thus be especially likely to experience and display poor moods and negative emotions.”

At the same time that your prefrontal cortex is under-functioning, poor sleep turns up the volume on your amygdala’s response to stress.

Brain imaging studies show that short sleep makes your amygdala—the part of the brain that helps control emotions—more hyperactive. This makes you more likely to interpret new challenges as a threat and contributes to feelings of anxiety, irritability, and depression.

READ THIS NEXT: Calming your Emotional Response

The Role of Sleep in Mental Health

Sleep and mental health are closely connected as sleep plays an essential role in helping you regulate your emotions, behavior, and mood.

In fact, it is not uncommon for those who struggle with mental health problems to also suffer from sleep challenges. Sleep deprivation definitely takes its toll on your mental health. For example, research has found that as many as two-thirds of patients suffering from clinical levels of anxiety or depression also have insomnia.

The correlation between mental health and sleep problems is so common that research actually recognizes sleep challenges as a causal factor in the development of mental health disorders. For example, research found that insomnia more than doubles the risk of future depression and anxiety. Similarly, chronic sleep problems affect 50% to 80% of patients in a typical psychiatric practice, compared with 10% to 18% of adults in the general U.S. population.

This could be attributed to the impact of sleep on resilience and memory. More specifically, research on sleep-dependent emotional brain processing found that sleep supports healthy emotional memory processing. Poor sleep can contribute to anger, impatience, irritability, and lack of energy. As a result, inadequate sleep may make you more likely to remember adverse events and less able to focus on the positive.

Healthy sleep patterns are also associated with positive personality characteristics. Research found that those who suffer from sleep challenges also report lower levels of optimism and self-esteem.

Essential Oils for Sleep

Essential Oils can help calm the mind and body before bed, helping you fall asleep and stay asleep for 7-8 hours per night. This allows the body to rest, regenerate, repair, detoxify, balance blood sugar levels, burn calories, support immune function, and replenish energy reserves.

Several calming, relaxing essential oils are known for their sedative properties and can help promote restful sleep.

Lavender essential oil is often associated with improved sleep. Research has shown that lavender may alter brain waves and reduce stress. For example, research has found that essential oils, like Lavender™, can bind to the receptors on your cells that receive your body’s calming neurotransmitter, Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), and help balance your brain’s level of excitation and inhibition, which is vital for normal brain function and a healthy nervous system.

READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Neurotransmitters

Lavender has also been found to relieve anxiety and calm your nerves. One study even suggested that lavender works as well as the anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam for calming anxiety. When your mind and body relax, it allows your pineal gland to release melatonin so you can easily drift off to sleep.

READ THIS NEXT: The Neuro-Protective Effects of Melatonin

Scientists also concluded that inhaling Lavender essential oil can calm the nervous system and improve brain waves appropriate to a sleep state. “Lavender oil caused significant decreases in blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature, which indicated a decrease in autonomic arousal. In terms of mood responses.”

The study also found that lavender oil increased the power of theta (4-8 Hz) and alpha (8-13 Hz) brain activity, which helps promote sleep, improving sleep quality and increasing time spent in deep, slow-wave sleep.

Researchers monitoring sleep cycles with brain scans found that lavender increased slow-wave sleep, which helps slow your heartbeat and relax your muscles, allowing you to sleep more soundly.

A variety of issues may be impacting your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Once you understand the root cause of your sleep challenges, it is easier to resolve them.

For Help Falling Asleep: Our body’s natural sleep/wake cycle, known as the circadian rhythms, is regulated by the sleep hormone, melatonin, which has an antagonistic relationship with the stress hormone, cortisol. Chronic stress triggers the release of excess cortisol at night, which lowers melatonin levels and makes it difficult to fall asleep. If you struggle to fall asleep due to stress or racing thoughts, consider Circadian Rhythm®, which triggers the pineal gland to naturally release melatonin.

For Help with Night Waking: Waking up in the middle of the night can be attributed to detoxification, blood sugar, or hormonal issues.

Blood Sugar Wake Ups: Waking up and feeling so wide awake that you could go clean the kitchen can suggest blood sugar issues. If blood sugar plummets during the night, the adrenal glands release adrenaline as an emergency measure to raise blood sugar. This adrenaline surge is what wakes you up. The pancreas then has to kick into high gear to return blood sugar levels to normal. Supporting the pancreas in this effort with Vibrant Blue Oils Pancreas™ blend helps restore balance so you can fall back asleep.

Detoxification Wake Ups: When you wake up between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. but are still groggy enough to fall back to sleep, that is often because the Liver is overloaded. During the night, the liver is busy rebuilding the body and cleansing it of accumulated toxins. The liver is most active between 1 and 3 AM, often peaking at 3 AM. When you awaken at this time, it usually signals that the liver needs a little support. Vibrant Blue Oils Liver™ blend applied before bed and during night waking can help you return to a restful slumber.

Hormonal Wake Ups: For Hormonal related sleep issues, Vibrant Blue Oils Gall Bladder™ can help detoxify excess estrogen to support optimal sleep and Hormone Balance™ can help support optimal balance for optimal rest.

Other Essential Oils formulations that help support sleep include:

Sleep™ blend contains Spikenard, known for its relaxing qualities.

The Calm™ blend and Lavender™ are also very relaxing and work well on small children, especially when added to a Healing bath before bed.

This article goes into great detail on specific sleep challenges and this checklist can help you identify which oil is best for your situation.

READ THIS NEXT: Identify the Root Cause of your Sleep Issue

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About The Author

Jodi Cohen

Jodi Sternoff Cohen is the founder of Vibrant Blue Oils. An author, speaker, nutritional therapist, and a leading international authority on essential oils, Jodi has helped over 50,000 individuals support their health with essential oils.

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