December 22, 2023 – Staying up late, not getting enough sleep or waking up regularly can significantly impact an individual's emotional health, based on a brand new evaluation that spans a long time of sleep research.
Healthy emotional functioning is crucial to our every day lives, researchers explained. They found that emotions affect our physical well-being, motivation, decision-making, social interactions, learning and memory.
The latest Insightsbased on an evaluation of sleep research over the past 50 years, appeared this week within the Journal of the American Psychological Association. Psychological Bulletin. In all 154 studies the researchers used, participants were studied overnight, taking a look at alternative ways people can lose sleep, akin to: B. keeping people awake for long periods of time, waking them up sooner than usual, or waking them recurrently throughout the night.
Researchers examined how these changes in sleep affect people's emotions and what effects they've on mood, akin to changes in anxiety or depression symptoms.
By combining data from greater than 5,700 people across all studies, researchers found that sleep disorders:
- Reduced positive emotions, akin to joy.
- Increased anxiety symptoms, akin to fast heartbeat or worry.
- Decreased ability to specific emotions, e.g. B. recounting the facts surrounding the death of a loved one but not with the ability to describe the way it makes you're feeling.
“This 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,” said researcher Cara Palmer, PhD, an assistant professor at Montana State University, in a study opinion. “We also found that sleep loss increased anxiety symptoms and decreased arousal in response to emotional stimuli.”
For most of the consequences the researchers examined, the more sleep an individual lost, the greater the emotional damage. Study participants were generally healthy and between 7 and 79 years old.
“Emotions govern virtually every aspect of our daily lives, and depriving ourselves of sleep seems like a sure-fire way to elect a terrible governor,” said University of Houston researcher and psychology professor Candice Alfano, PhD, who can be the director of Sleep Research and Anxiety Center of Houston, in an announcement. “Our results confirm that even with only mild sleep deprivation, there are measurable negative changes in how we respond to everyday events.”