AMMONNEWS – Sleep deprivation can go beyond just fatigue and affect emotional functioning, mood and make us less happy and more anxious, according to a review of more than 50 years of research on sleep deprivation.
“In our largely sleep-deprived society, measuring the effects of poor sleep on emotion is critical to promoting mental health,” said study lead author Cara Palmer, from Montana State University. “This study represents the most comprehensive synthesis of experimental sleep and emotion research to date, providing “There is strong evidence that extended periods of wakefulness, short sleep duration, and nighttime awakenings negatively affect human emotional functioning,” according to Russia Today.
Palmer and her colleagues from the University of East Anglia analyzed data from 154 studies spanning five decades, with a total of 5,715 participants. In all of these studies, researchers disrupted participants’ sleep for one or more nights.
In some experiments, participants stayed awake for a long time. In other cases, they were allowed a shorter period of sleep than usual, and in other cases they were awakened periodically throughout the night.
Each study measured at least one emotion-related variable after the sleep manipulation, such as participants’ self-reported mood, their responses to emotional stimuli, and measures of depressive and anxiety symptoms.
Overall, the researchers found that the three types of sleep loss led to fewer positive emotions such as joy, happiness, and contentment among participants, as well as increased symptoms of anxiety such as rapid heartbeat and increased anxiety.
“This happened 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 explained.
She added: “We also found that lack of sleep increases symptoms of anxiety and weakens arousal in response to emotional stimuli.”
Results related to depressive symptoms were smaller and less consistent, as were those related to negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety, and stress.
One limitation of the study was that the majority of participants were young, with the average age being 23 years. Future research should therefore include a more diverse age sample to better understand how sleep deprivation affects people of different ages, according to the researchers.
Other directions for future research could include studying the effects of sleep deprivation over multiple nights, looking at individual differences to see why some people are more vulnerable than others to the effects of sleep loss, and studying the effects of sleep loss across different cultures, as most of the research in the current study was conducted in United States and Europe.
Agencies
