This is how not sleeping affects your emotional stability

 

Sleep loss not only produces fatigue but can undermine emotional functioning, decrease positive moods and put us at greater risk for anxiety symptoms, according to a study published in the Psychological Buttin by the American Psychological Association that summarizes over 50 years of research on sleep deprivation and mood.

“In our largely sleep-deprived society, quantifying the effects of sleep loss on emotions is critical to promoting psychological health”, said study lead author Cara Palmer of Montana State University (USA).

“This study represents the most comprehensive synthesis of experimental research on sleep and emotion to date, and provides strong evidence that prolonged periods of wakefulness, shortened sleep duration, and nocturnal awakenings negatively influence human emotional function”, add.

Palmer and her colleagues, including co-lead author Joanne Bower, a PhD at the University of East Anglia, analyzed data from 154 studies conducted over five decades, involving a total of 5,715 participants.

In all of those studies, researchers interrupted participants’ sleep for one or more nights. In some experiments, participants were kept awake or an extended period. In others, they were allowed to sleep fewer hours than usual, and in others they awakened periodically throughout the night.

Each study also measured at least on 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 caused participants to experience fewer positive emotions, such as joy, happiness and satisfaction, as well as increased anxiety symptoms, such as increased heart rate and increased worry.

“This occurred even after short periods of sleep loss, such as staying up an hour or two later than usual or after losing only a few hours of sleep”, Palmer explains. “We also found that sleep loss increased anxiety symptoms and reduced arousal in response to emotional stimuli.

The results for depression symptoms were lower and less consistent, as were those for negative emotions such as sadness, worry and stress.

One limitation of the study is that most of the participants were young adults (mean age was 23 years), so according to the researchers, future research should include a more diverse sample of ages to better understand how sleep deprivation affects to people of different ages.

Other lines of research might include examining the effects of multiple nights of sleep loss, studying individual differences to find out why some people may be more vulnerable than others to the effects of sleep loss, and examining the effects of sleep loss across different cultures, as most of the research in the current study was conducted in the United States and Europe, according to researchers.

“Research has revealed that more than 30% of adults and up to 90% of adolescents do not get enough sleep”, says Palmer. “The implications of this research for individual and public health are considerable in a society at large measure of sleep deprivation”.

It adds that “industries and sectors prone to sleep loss, such as first responder, pilots and truck drivers should develop and adopt policies that prioritize sleep to mitigate risks to daytime function and well-being”.