How much sleep you get can affect how helpful you are?

 How much sleep you get can affect how helpful you are?

What factors into your level of generosity as a person? Could it be your financial situation? How generous are you? It might also depend on your values. All of these sound-like reasonable assumptions, but a recent study from Berkeley University reveals that even seemingly unimportant factors, like how well you've slept recently, might have an impact on your willingness to assist others on any given day. It was shown that lack of sleep causes generosity to decline.

Three distinct methods were used by the researchers to gauge how compassionate people were under duress. In the first experiment, 21 volunteers were denied sleep for 24 hours before being asked whether they would be inclined to assist in a variety of situations, such as carrying a stranger's shopping bags.

After a typical night's sleep, they invited the subjects to complete the altruism questionnaire again. Using fMRI imaging, the researchers also looked at the levels of brain activity among the 21 subjects.

Next, prior to completing the same questionnaire, 171 individuals who were recruited online kept a sleep diary. The researchers discovered that participants who were fatigued performed worse on the altruism test in both tests. This held true independent of the empathy traits of the participants or whether the person they were expected to assist was a stranger or someone they knew.

Finally, the researchers examined more than 3.8 million charitable contributions made in the US before and after the change of the clocks for summer, which results in an hour less of sleep for everyone. When compared to the weeks leading up to and following the time change, donations dropped by 10% in the days following the change.

Sleep deprivation appears to be linked to decreased activity in the part of the brain associated with social cognition, which governs our interpersonal interactions with others, according to an analysis of fMRI imaging data. Only the quantity of sleep was correlated with the change in brain activity. The good news is that this effect is transient and goes away soon we resume our regular sleeping patterns.

Sleep is essential for many facets of our health and welfare, as has long been known. This was memorably illustrated in 1959 when American DJ Peter Tripp broadcast live from Times Square in New York for 201 hours straight. Randy Gardner, a kid who stayed awake for 260 hours (almost 11 days) for a school science fair project, broke Peter's record in 1964.

Peter and Randy seemed to be handling their trials well. However, when the difficulty increased, individuals started to stumble over their words, occasionally were disoriented, and had trouble doing straightforward activities like reciting the alphabet.

Both experienced striking hallucinations. Peter thought a desk drawer had caught fire after he noticed cobwebs in his shoes.

We now understand that sleep deprivation is connected to mental health issues like psychosis and hallucinations. Despite the fact that Peter and Randy appeared to bounce back from their ordeals, research indicates that chronic sleep deprivation can cause neurological issues that last a lifetime.

Since Peter and Randy's exploits, research has revealed that sleep deprivation has an impact on the majority of behaviours, including our fundamental cognitive abilities like memory and decision-making. The Association of Professional Sleep Societies issued a study in the journal Sleep in 1988 cautioning that insufficient sleep increases the likelihood of experiencing an accident, such as a car crash or a home improvement incident.

A 2015 study examined the incidence of fatal automobile accidents in the US the day after the clocks went forward to summer time, when we lose an hour of sleep, and discovered a substantial rise in accidents.

According to psychologists, human social cognition—a sophisticated collection of processes that govern how we interact with people and choose how to behave toward them—includes kindness and generosity.

These choices are based on a variety of variables. How well we sleep has an impact on all of these things, including our memory, our ability to recall details of past events, the accuracy of our judgments, our tendency to act impulsively, and most importantly, our ability to control our emotions. It makes sense that the amount of money we are willing to give would likewise be sleep sensitive.

So give it some thought the next time a friend asks you to contribute to their marathon fundraising.