2023-12-21 16:00:15
Loss of sleep doesn’t just make us feel tired. It can undermine our emotional functioning, affect our mood and cause anxiety.
This has been seen in a study published in ‘Psychological Bulletin‘ which summarizes more than 50 years of research on sleep deprivation and mood.
The current lifestyle is related to a loss in the quantity and quality of hours of rest. According to Spanish Sleep Society (SES), the prevalence of chronic insomnia has doubled in Spain in the last two decades; Thus, chronic insomnia has gone from affecting 6.4% of the adult population in 1999 to over 14%, which means that 5.4 million people suffer from this sleep disorder in Spain.
“In a largely sleep-deprived society, quantifying its effects on emotions is essential to promote psychological health,” says the study’s lead author, Cara Palmer, from the Montana State University (USA.). “This study represents the most comprehensive synthesis of experimental research on sleep and emotions to date, and provides strong evidence that periods of prolonged wakefulness, reduced sleep duration, and nocturnal awakenings adversely affect human emotional functioning.”
The researchers analyzed data from 154 studies spanning five decades, with a total of 5,715 participants. In all of those studies, researchers interrupted participants’ sleep for one or more nights. In some of them, participants were kept awake for an extended period. In others, they were allowed to sleep less than usual, and in others they were awakened periodically during the night.
Each investigation also assessed at least one emotion-related variable after the sleep manipulation, such as participants’ self-reported mood, their response to emotional stimuli, and measures of depression and anxiety symptoms.
Overall, the researchers found that all three types of sleep loss resulted in fewer positive emotions such as joy, happiness and satisfaction among participants, as well as an increase in anxiety symptoms, such as a rapid heart rate and increased worry.
Sleep loss increased anxiety symptoms and reduced arousal in response to emotional stimuli
“This occurred even after short periods of sleep loss, such as staying awake an hour or two later than usual or after losing only a few hours of sleep,” Palmer said. “We also found that sleep loss increased anxiety symptoms and reduced arousal in response to emotional stimuli.”
The findings for depression symptoms were smaller and less consistent, as were those for negative emotions such as sadness, worry and stress.
A limitation of the study is that most of the participants were young, with an average age of 23 years. According to the researchers, future research should include a more diverse age sample to better understand how sleep deprivation affects people of different ages.
Research has found that more than 30% of adults and up to 90% of teenagers do not get enough sleep
Other future research could include examining the effects of multiple nights of sleep loss, examining individual differences to discover why some people may be more vulnerable than others to the effects of sleep loss, and examining the effects of sleep loss on different cultures, as most of the research in the current study was conducted in the US and Europe, according to the researchers.
“Research has found that more than 30% of adults and up to 90% of adolescents do not get enough sleep,” Palmer acknowledges.
In his opinion, the implications of this research for individual and public health are considerably important in a largely sleep-deprived society.
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