Exploring night-time vulnerability

By Nisya Salsabila Putri

Whether it is in reality or fiction, there has always been something about the night. Some say it's the quietness, others say it’s the darkness and the discreet nature it offers. Maybe it's the cups of coffee we consume to stay awake. Despite the differences in opinion, one thing is for sure, the night has its own ways of disarming our defence and stripping us out of our daily shenanigans.

Though after experiencing first-hand the effect of talking to the right person at night, perhaps way too many times, I start to wonder the real reason behind this ‘magic’ that night time seems to possess. In order to find the answer, I decided to go back to the root of the issue and have some late-night conversations on the matter. But this time, instead of reaching out to my friend, I decided to go with strangers on the internet.

Late-night conversation.

(Source: Unsplash/Korney Violin)

After going through some weird conversations, as one should when they are on an anonymous chat platform, I finally had an encounter with a person named Silver Jawa as his username. He mentioned how, to him, the sudden honesty hours we experience at night comes from the exhaustion that is accumulated throughout the day.

Surprisingly, Silver’s opinion is actually in line with a research done on the effects of sleep deprivation. An expert on sleep, circadian timing, and its effect on human performance, Associate Professor Claire Anderson of Monash University Australia, mentioned that the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a part of our brain responsible for emotion regulation, is particularly vulnerable to sleep loss. And when our PFC can’t optimally function, its control over our amygdala, the part of our brain that causes spontaneous emotions, would also loosen, and therefore causes the sudden burst of emotion to come out from us.

Another reason behind the deep late-night conversation phenomenon comes in the form of another anonymous chat platform user named Surveying Poppadom. Despite the food name that he uses as his alias, Poppadom actually claimed to be a 19-year-old university student, majoring in psychology. He said, “we are more likely to tell our secrets and things about ourselves to other people at night because our mind is at its most relaxed state then.”

Curious about the credibility of his statement, I decided to do a little research, and stumbled upon an article written by Rachel Nall, a certified nurse anesthetist. In the article, Nall mentioned how at night, our body would automatically produce a neurotransmitter called Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) that is meant to block certain signals in our brain, and therefore slow down its function. This is meant to prepare us for sleep by allowing us to be more relaxed.

As both our brain and our life in general are going at a slower rate, it leaves us vulnerable, though thankfully, not anymore to the predators in the wild, but to the monsters hiding in our subconscious thoughts, which then often leads to what people widely understood as ‘deep topics’ to be talked about at night.

While sometimes these late night conversations can have a good impact on our mental health, as we get to talk about the things that bother us, the continuous tendency to stay up late, might lead to not just our next day activities being interfered with, but also problems with our physical health. Please do allow your mind and your body to have the proper daily rest it needs and be wise in how you spend your night time.