Scientists have finally uncovered the reason why you sleep poorly when you travel to a new place. It’s all about your scumbag brain trying a little too hard to keep you alive.
A new study from researchers at Brown University wanted to figure out why sleep study subjects always sleep so badly on the first night of the tests. Well, it turns out the phenomenon — known in egghead circles as the “First Night Effect” — happens because a portion of your brain remains on high alert when you sleep somewhere new.
The researchers tested this by hooking subjects to brain-monitoring equipment and playing quiet sounds near their ears. The tests showed a much-stronger reaction to the sound on the left side of subjects’ brains than the right. The left-brain is associated with tasks that include remaining alert and has stronger connections overall to the parts of the brain that regulate sleep. On the second night, both hemispheres of the brain reacted equally to the stimuli and the subjects woke up far less.
And if you suffer from FNE, it doesn’t look like help is on the way.
“You might be able to reduce first-night effect, but we are not really sure if you can remove the effect completely,” co-author Masako Tamaki told CNN.
