Study shows that poor sleep can be a cause of anxiety and even unhappiness

Analysis

Adults over the age of 18 need at least seven hours of solid sleep at night to be healthy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Montana (USA) – A new study carried out in the United States, which analyzes 50 years of research, found that not getting enough sleep or sleeping poorly can greatly affect people’s mood and mental health.

“We found that all forms of sleep loss – total sleep deprivation, partial sleep loss and sleep fragmentation – resulted in emotional changes. The strongest and most consistent effect was that sleep loss reduced positive mood,” said co-author Cara Palmer, assistant professor and director of the Sleep and Development Laboratory at Montana State University in Bozeman.

“We also found that sleep loss increased feelings of anxiety,” Palmer said. “When experiencing emotional events, people were also more likely to report different reactions than people who were well rested.

“Specifically, they reported feeling less emotional arousal, which is when we feel the intensity of certain emotions in our body, suggesting that in general people felt quieter emotional responses after sleep loss.”

Adults over the age of 18 need at least seven hours of solid sleep at night to be healthy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When they fall short of that minimum, the price can be high: Studies link poor sleep to an increased risk of obesity, heart disease and dementia, as well as mood disorders.

Despite the risks, more than 30% of adults have a daily sleep debt – when you sleep less than your body needs – of more than one hour, while almost 1 in 10 adults loses two or more hours of sleep every nights, points out a 2022 study.

“Around the world, people rarely get the recommended amount of sleep of at least five nights a week,” Jo Bower, study co-leader and professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, said in an email. “Our work shows the potential consequences of this for our emotional health, at a time when mental health problems are rising rapidly.”

Types of sleep loss

Published Thursday in the journal Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, the research analyzed data from 154 studies on more than 5,000 people over five decades.

In these studies, researchers disturbed participants’ sleep for one or more nights, either by keeping them awake (sleep deprivation), waking them periodically (sleep fragmentation), or making them wake up earlier than usual (partial sleep loss). of sleep). Participants were later tested for anxiety, depression, mood and their response to emotional triggers.

“Generally, total sleep deprivation had a greater impact on mood and emotions compared to partial sleep loss or fragmented sleep,” Palmer said. “Interestingly, though, the effect of sleep on positive mood occurred even after short periods of sleep loss, such as staying up an hour or two later than usual or after losing just a few hours of sleep.”

The “large and comprehensive” meta-analysis emphasizes the strong connections between mental health and sleep, said sleep expert and pulmonologist Dr. Raj Dasgupta, associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. He was not involved in the research.
“Maybe there is truth behind the saying, ‘I woke up on the wrong side of the bed,’” Dasgupta said in an email.

“The studies included in the meta-analysis found that individuals who had poor quality and quantity of sleep reported feeling more stressed, irritable, sad, and mentally exhausted. When the subjects resumed normal sleep, they reported a dramatic improvement in mood.”

*With information from CNN Brasil

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