It has been found by a recent study that bad memories get locked up when a person sleeps soon after a traumatic experience. The findings of the study can be used to prevent depression, which is often caused due to traumatic emotional experience.

The study was conducted by the researchers of Massachusetts University. For the study, the researchers conducted a survey over 100 adults. During the survey, the emotional responses of the participants over a series of images expressing traumatic scenes were recorded.

After a period of 12 hours, the same process of exposing people to the traumatic images was repeated. However, during the gap, half of the participants were asked to sleep while other half did not sleep at all. During the study, it was found that sleep can prevent a person from experiencing emotional distress.

The negative emotions are locked in to the brain without causing an emotional harm to people. Moreover, the memory of the traumatic situation is also weaker as compared to those who didn’t sleep. Rebecca Spencer, the co- author of the study, was reported as saying, “It's true that 'sleeping on it' is usually a good thing to do. It's just when something truly traumatic or out of the ordinary happens that you might want to stay awake”.

A proper sleep in needed by the body to overcome the certain experiences of life which can be otherwise traumatic for a person throughout the life span. It has been proposed that further study would be conducted to study the link between age and sleeping disorder. It has been observed that with the age, the time spent on sleeping drops significantly. The researchers would be conducting the study to gauge as whether or not there is a link between cognitive and behavioral changes in the old age.