Jess in Action

De-stressing, especially during COVID-19 is very important. Hear from Dr. Jessica Payne about 3 tips to help you de-stress. 1. Protect your sleep at all costs. 2. 3 -5 minutes of relaxation exercise. 3. Surround yourself with positive people.

Turns out, your brain pulls an all-nighter when you hit the hay. Many regions of the brain - especially those involved in learning, processing information and emotion - are actually more active during sleep than when you're awake. These regions are working together while you sleep, helping you process and sort information you've taken in during the course of the day.

It's often on our weekend to-do list. Catching up on sleep has been a favorite pastime for many of us since we were teenagers, but as Dr. Jessica Payne points out, there's a limit to how much we can benefit from a sleep binge.

Jessica Payne's research indicated all of us could benefit if we took a nap each day. In fact, Payne says naps can benefit your brain as much as a full night's sleep. The trick is keeping your naps brief enough, or long enough, so that you don't wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle and feel groggy or fatigued after. Whatever the duration, Payne's data suggests we never should've left daytime naps in kindergarten.

Adults are typically told they need about eight hours of sleep each night. While the majority of us do need between seven and nine hours, Payne points out that the amount of sleep needed by adults is evenly distributed, meaning there are those among us who can get by on four or five hours, and some who need more than nine.

Seymour Benzer/Sydney Brenner Lecture What's going on in your head while you sleep? The research of Notre Dame Professor Jessica Payne shows that the non-waking hours are incredibly valuable for your day-to-day life, especially for helping to commit information to memory and for problem solving. If you ever thought sleep was just downtime between one task and the next, think again. The fact is, your brain pulls an all-nighter when you hit the hay. Many regions of the brain - especially those involved in learning, memory, creativity, and emotion - are actually more active during sleep than when you're awake. These regions are working together while you sleep, helping you process and sort information you've taken in during the course of the day. Professor Payne's research has focused on what types of information are consolidated into memory, and has been instrumental in better understanding how the brain stores and reorganizes the information. » Jessica Payne, University of Notre Dame

Sleep, Memory, and the Brain: How Sleep and Stress Interact to Facilitate Emotional Memory Formation Jessica Payne, Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame Why do we sleep? It is remarkable that although it is 2017, we scientists still have not answered this question. Although we may not know sleep’s function, it is clear that sleep is essential for brain health and for the various cognitive functions the brain supports. Of these functions, memory consolidation – the ability to retain newly learned information – has received the most empirical support. My laboratory and others have demonstrated that sleep is not only essential for simple memory storage, but also for various forms of memory restructuring and transformation that allow us to use our knowledge and experiences in flexible and adaptive ways. Sleep benefits the consolidation of emotional memories in particular, often at the expense of more neutral memories. Interestingly, separate, indeed largely isolated, fields of research demonstrate that both sleep and stress hormones like cortisol can selectively benefit the consolidation of emotional aspects of our experiences. However, the interaction of sleep and stress in memory-relevant regions of the brain may be necessary for the consolidation of robust emotional memories. The first part of my talk will examine the distinct roles that sleep and stress play in the formation of emotional memories. In the second part, I will discuss new evidence, from behavioral, psychophysiological, and brain imaging studies, suggesting that stress and arousal interact with sleep to benefit memory consolidation, particularly for negative emotional information. Although preserving memories for negative emotional events is typically adaptive, excessive memory for such events can contribute to mental health disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the final part of my talk, I will present a new model that argues that stress-related neurochemicals may help ‘tag’ attended information as important to remember at the time of new learning, thus enabling subsequent, sleep-based neural processes to optimally consolidate emotional information in a selective manner. A schematic of the model is presented below. Abbreviations: NE, Norepinephrine; CORT, Cortisol; Amy, Amygdala; HC, Hippocampus; vmPFC, Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

"Sleep and Stress Interact to Promote Emotional Memory Consolidation" Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Separate lines of research demonstrate that elevated stress hormones (e.g. cortisol and norepinephrine) can selectively benefit the consolidation of emotional memories, as can the occurrence of sleep shortly after learning. I will discuss evidence, from behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies, suggesting that stress and arousal interact with sleep to augment memory consolidation, particularly for emotionally negative information. I will present a model arguing that stress hormones help ‘tag’ emotional information as important to remember at the time of encoding, thus enabling subsequent, sleep-based plasticity processes to optimally consolidate emotional information in a selective manner.