Questão 12 - EMESCAM 2024/1

INSTRUCTIONS: Read the following text to answer the question.

 

According to the Sleep Foundation in America, a conservative estimate is that 10 to 30 per cent of adults experience chronic insomnia or problems with sleeping. One common way this manifests is through difficulty falling asleep in the first place, especially due to anxious thoughts whizzing about.

Indeed, a study from the University of Oxford found that a key difference between insomniacs and controls was the content of their thoughts at bedtime, with the problem sleepers being more focused on worries and concerns as compared with the healthy controls who tended to think about nothing in particular.

Anecdotally, many of us have had the experience of falling blissfully fast asleep in front of the TV, only to find that when we stir and take ourselves to bed, we lie there wide-awake with anxious thoughts racing through our minds. This common scenario neatly encapsulates one of the main reasons our heads fill with worry at night – it’s the lack of distraction.

When you’re busy during the day, your brain is occupied with all manner of tasks and activities, whether working, doing chores, talking to others or having fun. In the evening, you might eat dinner, chat and then watch TV – all the while, the brain is occupied, especially the regions involved in planning, decision making and other aspects of worry

Yet the moment you rest your head on your pillow and switch out the lights, all external distraction and engagement with the outside world is gone. Your mind is entirely free to turn in on itself, either to fret about all that’s happened or to worry about the next day to come – the past and the future being the two main sources of anxious thoughts.

Available at: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/ anxious-thoughts-sleep-insomnia. Accessed on: Aug. 16, 2023.

The verb to fret in “Your mind is entirely free to turn in on itself, either to fret about all that’s happened or to worry about the next day to come…” is closest in meaning to