Finitude of Emotions - Between Intensity and Forgetting – Decolonial Neuroscience SfN Brain Bee

First-Person Consciousness

“I am the emotion that pulses within me. In the day, I vibrate as joy, explode as anger, collapse as sadness, ignite as love. I give color and rhythm to consciousness, move decisions, shape memories. But when night comes, I begin to lose contours: I feel smaller, dissolved in waves that no longer fix themselves. In deep sleep, I discover that I am not eternal — I am flow, intensity that dissolves to be reborn at dawn.”

Emotion and the Damasian Mind

• Emotions: short, rapid bioelectrical discharges that mobilize body and attention.
  
  

• Feelings: metabolic stabilizations of these emotions, sustaining belonging and identity.
  
  

• Damasian Mind: integrates both dimensions within the body-territory, as records of belonging in the mental hyperspace.
  
  

• Inference: emotion is a lightning bolt that illuminates; feeling is the fire that warms. Both meet their finitude in sleep, where they reorganize to avoid overloading the mind.
  
  

The Finitude of Emotions in Sleep

• N1: emotional fragments appear as loose images, echoes of daytime tensions.
  
  

• N2: spindles stabilize emotional traces, reducing the chance of rumination.
  
  

• N3: slow waves attenuate exaggerated reactions; here, anger and sadness find a space of damping.
  
  

• REM tonic: emotions return as symbolic scenarios, without linearity, adjusting extended proprioception (Apus).
  
  

• REM phasic: feelings and emotions blend into vivid narratives, creating dreamlike stories that may relieve or transform emotional burden.
  
  

Neuroscience of Emotion in Sleep

• EEG: higher delta amplitude in N3 correlates with reduced emotional reactivity.
  
  

• fNIRS: prefrontal deoxygenation in deep sleep favors the integration of emotions into feelings.
  
  

• SpO₂: its decline during sleep allows reduced alert states, essential for emotional dissolution.
  
  

• Integration: the finitude of emotions is part of the balancing process between limbic networks (amygdala) and prefrontal networks.
  
  

When Finitude is Blocked

• Anxiety and depression: maintain hyperactivity of the amygdala, preventing emotions from dissolving.
  
  

• Trauma: fragments N3 and REM, causing intense emotions to invade dreams.
  
  

• Zone 3: the body remains on alert, preventing the natural drop of tensions and keeping the Tensional Self trapped in repetitive narratives.
  
  

For Clinicians and Caregivers

• Promote rituals of slowing down before sleep (breathing, slow music, emotion writing).
  
  

• Avoid intense emotional stimuli at night (news, social media).
  
  

• In palliative care: recover positive emotional memories as anchors of belonging and softening of pain.
  
  

Conclusion

Emotions are necessary explosions of consciousness, but their continuous permanence exhausts body and mind. The night is the natural laboratory of emotional finitude: in it, excesses dissolve, tensions are pruned, and emotions are transformed into more stable feelings. At dawn, we do not awaken empty of emotion but renewed in the possibility of feeling again.

References

• Yuksel C. et al. (2025). Complementary roles of SWS and REM in emotional memory consolidation.
  
  

• Keeble L. (2025). Sleep oscillations and hippocampal–neocortical dialogue in memory consolidation.
  
  

• Cunningham T.J. (2022). Sleep and emotional memory processing: a review.
  
  

• Luo Y. et al. (2024). Prefrontal connectivity associated with analgesia: an fNIRS study.
  
  

• Gong H. et al. (2022). Prefrontal excitability dynamics across sleep stages measured by fNIRS.
  
  

• Halonen R. et al. (2024). REM sleep theta oscillations preserve stress responsiveness.
  
  

• Duan W. et al. (2025). Selective consolidation of salient and rewarded memories during sleep.
  
  

• Chen X. et al. (2024). Postpartum insomnia alters prefrontal connectivity: an fNIRS study.