Even one night of sleep loss affects mental, physical health, according to a new study
Participants experienced symptoms like angry and nervous feelings, as well as body aches and upper respiratory problems.
Sleep is important for recovery and overall health, but researchers are still learning about how much we need to stay healthy. Researchers have even begun studying families who seem to not need very much sleep at all. For the rest of us, new research suggests that keeping a regular sleep schedule is vital to maintaining our mental and physical health.
A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine suggests that a few consecutive nights of sleep loss can lead to great deterioration of mental and physical well-being. One night of bad sleep leads to the biggest jump in symptoms, according to the study.
This means that pushing yourself during the week, then trying to recover sleep on the weekends may not actually be a good strategy for your health.
“Many of us think that we can pay our sleep debt on weekends and be more productive on weekdays,” said Soomi Lee, assistant professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida and author of the paper, in a press release. “However, results from this study show that having just one night of sleep loss can significantly impair your daily functioning.”
To study this phenomenon, Lee analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States Study. Nearly 2,000 middle-aged adults participated by providing daily diary data for eight consecutive days. Lee then compared the sleep hours to daily well-being.
Turns out, 42 percent of the participants experienced at least one night of sleep loss, meaning they lost about an hour and half of sleep. When you look at their daily logs of mental and physical well-being, you see that they record feelings of anger, nervousness, loneliness, irritability and frustration as a result of losing sleep. The participants also documented physical symptoms like upper respiratory issues, aches, gastrointestinal issues and other health concerns.
When Lee looked at data across consecutive days of sleep loss, the mental and physical symptoms stayed elevated and didn’t return to baseline levels unless the participants had a night of sleep that lasted more than six hours. The biggest increase in symptoms was after the first night of sleep loss, and the rate slowed with additional days of sleep loss.
This suggests that putting effort into breaking a cycle of bad sleep would be better for overall health than pushing it to the weekend. About one-third of adults in the U.S. sleep fewer than six hours a night. Once that becomes a habit, it’s very difficult for the body to recover from lack of sleep, says Lee. This can affect not only long-term health but also job performance. For these reasons, Lee recommends setting aside more than six hours a night for sleep.
Sleeping and waking one hour earlier cuts risk of depression: study
Researchers combined genetic data with sleep tracker data and sleep preference surveys.
Depression affects many aspects of life, and for some people it may mean that they sleep longer or different hours than they would normally. “We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?” says senior author Celine Vetter, assistant professor of integrative physiology at Colorado University Boulder, in a press release.
A previous study from Vetter and collaborators found that in a four-year study of 32,000 nurses that “early risers” were 27 percent less likely to develop depression symptoms. But how would shifting a sleep schedule potentially affect people? That’s what this new study focuses on.
The study followed 840,000 people and collected data on their chronotype, meaning what hours of the day they were predisposed to prefer, based on genetic information. One “clock gene” is thought to account for 12 to 42 percent of our sleep timing.
The researchers wanted to know if someone’s genetics makes them more likely to be an “early riser” if they also have lower risk for depression. So they gave some study participants sleep trackers and some filled out a sleep preference questionnaire. They then connected those data to genetic data.
The team focused on the sleep midpoint, calculated as halfway between bedtime and wake time. “We found that even one-hour earlier sleep timing is associated with significantly lower risk of depression,” says Vetter in the press release. So if someone who normally goes to bed at midnight instead goes to bed at 11 PM and sleeps for the same duration, they could cut their risk by 23 percent, according to the study. The effect could be nearly twice that if shifted by two hours.
The researchers aren’t certain why they are seeing these results, but it may have to do with light and darkness and how our bodies react. Light research has shown that light therapy can be helpful for treating some mood disorders.
The connection to depression symptoms could also be a result of societal norms. Simply having a chronotype that does not make you an early riser could be having an effect. “We live in a society that is designed for morning people, and evening people often feel as if they are in a constant state of misalignment with that societal clock,” says lead author Iyas Daghlas at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
If you want to shift to an earlier sleep schedule, there are some things you can do to help make that process easier. “Keep your days bright and your nights dark,” says Vetter. “Have your morning coffee on the porch. Walk or ride your bike to work if you can, and dim those electronics in the evening.”
Psychological effects of the pandemic may be felt in young people for a long time to come
Surveys found increased symptoms of anxiety and depression, and especially in subgroups like women and LGBT youth.
The pandemic has taken a toll on the mental wellness of many people around the world, and some experts are concerned about the lasting effects it could have on adolescents and young adults especially.
“The risk for the future is that we have a group who have spent almost a year and a half of their early life in a total blackout, gaining no experience or human capital,” Massimiliano Mascherini, the head of social policy at the EU’s foundation for living and working, told The Guardian. “They may represent a part of the workforce that will suffer throughout their lives.”
A survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) from 2020 found more than 7 in 10 Generation Z individuals reported symptoms of depression and reported the highest level of stress compared to other age groups. “Life cannot be lived in social networks or video calls. We need people around us to make sense of ourselves,” a Dutch student tells The Guardian. “My mental health deteriorated so badly. I had to start antidepressants,” an undergraduate student from the U.K. told the Guardian.
A recent study published in The Lancet Psychiatry surveyed people in Iceland ages 13 to 18 in 2016, 2018 and 2020. The researchers found an increase in depressive symptoms and worse mental well being during the pandemic along with greater use of substances like cigarettes, electronic cigarettes and alcohol. These outcomes were worse in adolescent girls than in boys, according to the authors.
A similar study of 500 people in the age group above at 18 to 25 years old found similar results that suggested women were more impacted than men. The young women showed increased rates of depression and anxiety symptoms. “Although certain public health measures were important in controlling the spread of the virus, the benefits of social support and interaction, which often act as buffers against the effects of stress, have also been reduced due to the pandemic,” said senior author James MacKillop in a press release.
“Collectively, these results indicate the importance of critical thinking and considering population subgroups when it comes to COVID-19's psychological impacts," MacKillop said in the press release. “Rather than uniform increases or decreases, it's increasingly clear that subgroups will show very different patterns, including both negative and, in some cases, positive changes.”
Another subgroup is LGBT youth. In a survey, 73 percent of them reported anxiety symptoms, 67 percent reported depression symptoms and 48 percent reported serious thoughts of suicide, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This group was already at increased risk for depression, suicidal ideation and substance use before the pandemic.
The APA survey also highlighted that some of the reasons for stress among Gen Z individuals include current events, such as widespread sexual harassment or assault reports in the news, rise in suicide rates or change in abortion laws. Nearly 80 percent of Gen Zers said the future of the nation was a significant source of stress.
“I feel constantly anxious,” said a 23-year-old student in Estonia to the Guardian. “It’s the uncertainty about the future that hurts the most.”
Researchers will need to continue to study the ongoing effects of the pandemic to understand the potential long-term implications. “This is a very bleak mix of mental health, economic and social impacts,” Mascherini told Guardian. “In previous recessions, those who suffered most, in terms of the labour market, bore the scars in later employability. They never caught up.”