Scientists Discovered an Unexpected Side Effect of Working the Night Shift
· Vice
Working the night shift sounds pretty chill. Sure, you have to keep an eye out for night creeps and thieves, but the world is quieter, calmer. It’s easy to understand the appeal. That is, until you understand the science of how working night shifts may shrink parts of your brain.
According to a new study published in NeuroImage, detailed by PsyPost., researchers analyzing data from 14,198 participants in the UK Biobank found that people who regularly work night shifts show small but measurable reductions in the volume of their left amygdala and the right thalamus.
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Their brains aren’t dissolving like the wicked witch of the West doused with water. The changes were modest at best, but they were consistent enough for researchers to detect across a large swath of the population measured. A more important aspect of it is that the same areas were affected over and over again.
The Areas of Your Brain Affected by Night Shift Work
The amygdala plays a big role in emotional regulation, and the thalamus is kind of a relay hub involved in a variety of functions, like attention, memory, and your sleep-wake cycles. Combined, this means that working at night while everyone else is getting their rest is messing with the parts of the brain associated with mood, focus, and sleep quality, which makes sense considering that people who work nights are spending years fighting their body’s natural sleep schedule.
It’s that disruption of circadian rhythm that seems to be the core issue here. Pair that with previous studies that have long linked shift work in general, with particular emphasis on working the night shift, with a range of physical and mental health issues, like depression, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes, and we start to develop a clearer picture of how dangerous working at night can be. It’s literally, though subtly, changing the physical structure of the brain itself.
The only silver lining in all of this is that the research found that participants who stopped working night shifts were able to halt brain volume loss within about 2.4 years, with some light evidence of recovery. While it remains to be seen whether a night shift brain can fully bounce back from the damage that’s been done, there is at least a sliver of hope that the damage isn’t permanent.
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