Why Does Lost Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Magnify Small Stuff?

Andrew Huberman says depriving people of rapid eye movement sleep makes them selectively bad at uncoupling emotion from things that happened in the previous days. Little things start to seem like big things. People become slightly psychotic in that state. He notices it when he is irritable and when the word the no longer looks spelled right.

Sleep deprivation makes people irritable. Early in the night, more of each 90-minute cycle is slow-wave sleep, sometimes called non-REM sleep. Early bouts help muscular repair and certain forms of learning. Rapid eye movement sleep fills more of each 90-minute cycle later, typically toward morning. Emotional processing happens then, along with the return of feeling refreshed rather than irritated. With more fatigue, sleep drops straight into rapid eye movement and skips stage one, stage two, and stage three, so the system compensates. Huberman says there may be bouts when saying nothing is the better move, to conserve energy. A grind feeling is epinephrine being released, epinephrine that physical effort could use. Humor resets the irritation through dopamine and a fresh perspective. He says the reset is biology, a real chemical event, not a hack, a trick, or a visualization.