2023-12-23 05:01:00
(CNN) — Not getting enough sleep or sleeping poorly can greatly affect your mood and mental health, according to a new study that analyzes 50 years of research.
“We found that all forms of sleep loss—complete sleep deprivation, partial sleep loss, and sleep fragmentation—caused emotional changes. The strongest and most consistent effect was that sleep loss reduced positive mood,” he said. co-senior 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 in an email. “When experiencing emotional events, people were also more likely to report reacting differently 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 overall people felt more muted emotional responses following sleep loss.”
Adults over 18 need at least seven hours of restful sleep at night to be healthy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States. When they don’t reach that minimum, the consequences can be serious: studies have linked insufficient sleep with 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 they sleep less than what the body needs — of more than one hour, while almost 1 in 10 adults are two hours short. or more sleep each night, according to a 2022 study.
“Across the world, individuals rarely get the recommended amount of sleep for at least 5 nights a week,” said study co-author Jo Bower, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, in an email. . “Our work shows the possible consequences of this for our emotional health, at a time when mental health problems are increasing rapidly.”
Types of sleep loss
The investigation, published on thursday in the journal Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association, analyzed data from 154 studies on more than 5,000 people over five decades.
In those studies, researchers interrupted 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). Participants were then tested for anxiety, depression, mood, and response to emotional triggers.
“Overall, complete sleep deprivation had a greater impact on mood and emotions compared to partial sleep loss or fragmented sleep,” Palmer said. “Interestingly, however, the effect of sleep on positive mood occurred even following short periods of sleep loss, such as staying awake an hour or two later than usual or following losing only a few hours of sleep “.
According to Dr. Raj Dasgupta, pulmonologist and sleep specialist, associate professor of Clinical Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, this “large and comprehensive” meta-analysis highlights the close relationship between mental health and the dream. Dasgupta was not involved in the investigation.
“The studies included in the meta-analysis found that subjects who (had) poor quantity and quality of sleep reported feeling more stressed, angry, sad, and mentally exhausted. When the subjects resumed normal sleep, they reported a dramatic improvement in sleep status. in spirit,” Dasgupta said in an email.
What is happening?
What does sleep have that makes our body behave like this? According to Palmer, the answer lies in the brain.
“We know from previous research that sleep loss affects the neural circuits involved in experiencing rewards or positive experiences, which probably has something to do with it,” he says. “We also observed exacerbated reactions in areas of the brain involved in emotional experiences.”
“At the same time, connections between our emotional centers in the brain and our prefrontal cortex, which helps us properly control our emotional reactions, deteriorate.”
Although all types of sleep disturbances affected mood, the study found that reactions to emotional experiences were more negative following loss of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep compared to loss of slow-wave or REM sleep. “deep”.
During slow-wave sleep, the body removes potentially harmful materials from the brain—including the beta-amyloid protein, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease—while REM sleep is the phase of sleep in which we dream and information and experiences are consolidated and stored in memory.
“Both are probably important, but in different ways,” Bower says. “For example, previous work has shown that the REM sleep “may be related to the processing of emotional memories and, therefore, might have an effect on mood through cognitive processes.”
Slow-wave sleep, however, might be linked to the brain’s reward centers, which might influence responses to positive emotional situations, he said.
Deep sleep is considered one of the best markers of sleep quality, because a person must have relatively uninterrupted sleep to achieve it. Since each sleep cycle lasts regarding 90 minutes, most adults need between seven and eight hours of relatively uninterrupted sleep to achieve restful sleep, according to studies. CDC.
Impact on anxiety and depression
According to the study, sleep loss also worsened symptoms of anxiety and depressioneven in people without known psychiatric or physical disorders.
“Longer periods of wakefulness led to more extreme depressive or anxiety symptoms,” Palmer said. “Sleep loss is likely to differentially affect people who are already depressed or who are at genetic risk for depression. For example, some of our previous work suggests that individuals who are (already) anxious may experience exaggerated responses.” to loss of sleep.
Difficulty sleeping can also be one of the first signs of an emerging mental disorder, Dasgupta says.
“Chronic insomnia can increase a person’s risk of developing a mood disorder, such as depression or anxiety,” he says. “Lack of sleep may be an even greater risk factor for anxiety.” The studies included in the meta-analysis show that individuals with insomnia were more likely to develop an anxiety disorder and that insomnia is also a reliable predictor of depression.
Obstructive sleep apnea, in which the body may stop breathing for 10 seconds or more at a time, can also create fragmented and disturbed sleep, according to Dasgupta. This type of sleep disorder “occurs more frequently in people with psychiatric conditions and needs to be addressed,” he said.
More research is needed to determine the impact of poor sleep on people with existing mental disorders, teenagers and childrenbut each person should be careful to prioritize sleep in their lives, Bower said.
“Allowing yourself time to sleep is an important act of self-care, as is eating well and exercising,” Bower said. “It is also important that we make systemic changes that support people’s ability to get good quality sleep.
“This includes considering policies regarding school start times, work hours, shift patterns, and access to healthcare that supports the treatment of sleep problems.”
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