By Dr. Ryan Neely, Ph.D.
With Valentine’s Day upon us, many people will be (maybe scrambling) to make plans to spend time with their partner, while others may be making plans to ignore the holiday altogether. Either way, it certainly can’t hurt to use this occasion to put a little more thought into our own emotional well-being and how we relate to those around us.
It probably comes as no surprise that sleep and emotion are linked. We have all experienced irritability and a short supply of patience when we’re running on little sleep. In the extreme, scientists have found links between sleep disturbance and psychopathology - this has led to research efforts to better understand how sleep and emotion are intertwined. In this post we’ll explore some of those relationships and how a focus on sleep quality and quantity can improve our internal and external emotional health.
In general, much of the scientific data supports what many of us can already guess from personal experience. For example, Larson et al. found a single night of sleep deprivation increased anxiety in subjects. They also found increased cardiovascular reactivity to a mild stressor - suggesting that both psychological and physiological responses to sleep deprivation trend towards a state of higher stress and stress reactivity (1). Similarly, Minkel et al. found that after sleep deprivation, subjects responded with greater anxiety and anger towards a low-stress task. Interestingly, their responses to a high-stress task were the same in both sleep-deprived and rested states. These findings suggest that the effects of sleep deprivation may be to lower the threshold for negative emotional responses - meaning that under these conditions, people may be quicker to experience anger and anxiety (2). Finally, a study of medical residents under sleep-deprived conditions found that the effects of sleep on emotion may exert their effects on motivation. Specifically, the study found that lack of sleep increased the subjects’ sensitivity to events that were disruptive to their goals, whereas they experienced less positive emotions related to events that worked in favor of their goals (3).
It’s easy to see how missing out on sleep can make it difficult to stay positive and have patience with others. One final study that I find especially salient for Valentine’s day is one conducted by Gilbert et al. in 2015. In this experiment, 77 participants tracked their sleep as well as when they experienced interpersonal rejection, and how it made them feel. The authors of the study found that only under conditions of poor sleep (both quantity and quality) did subjects experience hurt feelings after rejection (4). So if you’re worried about finding yourself unlucky in love this Valentine’s day, at least try to get a good night’s sleep first!
References
- Larson, R.A., Durocher, J.J., Yang, H., DellaValla, J.P. and Carter, J.R., 2012. Influence of 24‐hour sleep deprivation on anxiety and cardiovascular reactivity in humans.
- Minkel, J.D., Banks, S., Htaik, O., Moreta, M.C., Jones, C.W., McGlinchey, E.L., Simpson, N.S. and Dinges, D.F., 2012. Sleep deprivation and stressors: evidence for elevated negative affect in response to mild stressors when sleep deprived. Emotion, 12(5), p.1015.
- Zohar, D., Tzischinsky, O., Epstein, R. and Lavie, P., 2005. The effects of sleep loss on medical residents' emotional reactions to work events: a cognitive-energy model. Sleep, 28(1), pp.47-54.
- Gilbert, L.R., Pond Jr, R.S., Haak, E.A., DeWall, C.N. and Keller, P.S., 2015. Sleep problems exacerbate the emotional consequences of interpersonal rejection. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 34(1), pp.50-63.