Neuroscience reveals that people who overthink at night often have brains that refuse to file away unresolved emotional experiences during the day - Silicon Canals

"During the day, your brain is constantly processing emotional experiences - sorting them, labeling them, deciding what matters and what doesn't. Neuroscientists call this emotional memory consolidation, and it relies heavily on a dialogue between two regions: the prefrontal cortex (your rational, planning brain) and the amygdala (your threat-detection, emotion-flagging brain)."

"In a well-regulated system, the prefrontal cortex acts like an efficient office manager. It reviews emotional events, assigns them context, and files them into long-term memory with a tag that essentially says: dealt with, move on. Research published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience has shown that this consolidation process depends on the brain having enough cognitive bandwidth during waking hours to process emotional residue in real time."

"Many of us don't give our brains that bandwidth. We fill every gap with noise - scrolling, podcasts, back-to-back meetings, the constant low hum of digital stimulation. The emotional events don't get filed. They get shoved to the side. And unprocessed emotions don't just evaporate. They wait."

The brain continuously processes emotional experiences during the day through a dialogue between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, a process called emotional memory consolidation. The prefrontal cortex acts as an office manager, reviewing emotional events, assigning context, and filing them into long-term memory. However, constant digital stimulation and cognitive demands throughout the day prevent proper emotional processing. Unprocessed emotions don't disappear; they accumulate and wait. When external stimulation decreases at night, the brain uses this quiet window to process the backlog of unresolved emotional experiences, causing intrusive thoughts and rumination during sleep attempts.

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