Comfortable mattress, pillow, clean linens, optimal room temperature and perfect silence around, but you can't fall asleep? Many people, trying to fall asleep in a new place, even in the most comfortable conditions, constantly toss and turn, wake up and sleep quite sensitively. All this leads to the fact that in the morning a person who is tired of lack of sleep wakes up with dreams of his own bed. Recently, scientists managed to find out why it is difficult to sleep in a new place – estet-portal.com will talk about this in this article.
Why I don’t sleep well in a new place: the brain is to blame for everything
Restless sleep in a new place – a phenomenon so well known to sleep experts that they have given it a special name – "the phenomenon of the first night." For some reason, under a new roof, a person feels so uncomfortable that he cannot sleep properly at night.
Scientists have been observing the brains of sleeping people for fifty years in the hope of finding out why it is difficult to sleep in a new place. And a team of experts and the United States put forward a fairly plausible theory: when we fall asleep in an unusual environment, our brain spends the first night in observation mode – when one hemisphere goes into sleep mode, the other remains "on the lookout".
Effect of the first night – this is what experts call restless sleep in a new place on the first night.
Masako Tamaki, a sleep researcher at Brown University in Rhode Island, explained: "When we don't know for sure whether the room we're sleeping in is safe, the brain activates a surveillance system that detects potential danger." ;.
If further research confirms this theory, the effect of the first night could be the human equivalent of birds sleeping with their eyes open or dolphins sleeping alternately to detect potential predator attacks.
To study the effect of the first night, Tamaki and her team used neuroimaging technologies: magnetoencephalography, structural MRI, and polysomnography to monitor the sleep of 35 people in a laboratory setting.
Images taken on the first night showed that the right hemispheres of the study participants were in normal sleep mode, however, their left hemispheres remained more active. After that, scientists tested the reaction of sleeping volunteers to the sounds of low tones. Basically, the sleeping brain ignored such sounds until they were replaced by high tones. After that, the left hemisphere of the brain began to work actively, and the volunteers themselves often woke up.
According to Masako, the brain's nighttime monitoring system responds to unusual sounds that could indicate a potential threat. Interestingly, no such effect was observed on the second night.
The left hemisphere of the brain does not go into sleep mode: it remains on guard for the safety of the sleeper.
At the same time, scientists are not sure that the first night in a new place does not sleep well solely because of the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain. Since they observed brain activity only during 90 minutes of volunteers' sleep, experts do not exclude the possibility that the hemispheres succeed each other, like in dolphins.
Why then are some people quite comfortable falling asleep anywhere? According to Yuka Sasaki, co-author of the study, the brains of people who are not affected by the effect of the first night are more adapted to changes in the environment.
For those who do not sleep well in unusual surroundings, estet-portal.com recommends: for a more restful sleep, take your favorite pillow with you when traveling or fall asleep in rooms that are most similar to your usual place of sleep. Indeed, the first night in a new environment must be experienced. However, over time, the brain adapts to the new location and its initially heightened vigilance is gradually lulled.
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