Sleeping well at night means being in a better mood and happier during the day and vice versa, study finds

When comparing sleep characteristics with happiness and negative mood on the next day, results showed shorter sleep duration and more problems in sleeping and waking up were associated with more negative mood the next day. However, these results were obtained only for subjective sleep measures, not for objective ones.

“Better mood (higher happiness and lower negative mood) predicted better quality sleep and worse mood predicted worse quality sleep,” the study authors wrote and concluded that “in order to fall asleep, persons must feel safe and enter a state of relaxation. In order to maintain vigilance to threats in the environment and consciously process information, persons must be awake. It is possible that adolescents who are experiencing negative mood or low positive mood during the day are ruminating at night, which is a state of cognitive pre-sleep arousal in which adolescents are maintaining a state of conscious processing of thoughts.”

While the study makes an important contribution to the knowledge about psychological mechanisms of sleep, the authors note that some of the actigraph measures ran counter to their expectations and to subjective measures. Also, all the associations were examined in adolescents of roughly the same age and results on people of different age might not be the same.

Some Insights From This Article

• Research shows that there is a correlation between sleep and the following day mood. This relationship was also shown to be reciprocal as good mood can also promote good sleep and worser moods was associated with poor sleep.

• The researchers posit that possible reason this may be is because our minds tend to be more active when we are particularly in a bad mood as we tend to ruminate on our thoughts more and think about negative emotions/situations before we begin falling asleep.

• This cycle can also feed forward in causing a bad mood the following day. Inadequate sleep has been shown to be associated with poor mood the following day which usually come associated with symptoms of being sleep deprived.

• An important step in improving our mood is therefore improving the quality and regularity of sleep!

How does sleep affect your mood?

Full article is here!

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