Disturbed Sleep Can Cause People’s Bad Mood

Drawing on previous research linking a healthy night’s sleep with a lower incidence of mood disorders and cognitive capacity, Ph.D.

In order to reach the findings, the researchers observed around 62 healthy men and women who were tested on three sleep experimental conditions in a inpatient clinical research suite. People in both the frequently woken group and the sleep-deprived group had low levels of positive emotions, and high levels of negative mood in the morning.

The study suggested that interrupted sleep can result into bad moods and was even worse as compared to getting short or delayed sleep. They noticed 31% reduction in positive mood of the participants of the forced awakening group along with 12% decline in positive mood among the delayed bedtime group in comparison to the first day.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that people who sleep at a later time have improved moods come morning compared to people who go to bed at a fixed hour only to have their sleep disturbed in the middle of the night. One of the three groups was subjected to forced awakenings, i.e they were forcefully woken up during deep and sound sleep. By the final day, there was no difference between the moods in the forced awakening and delayed bedtime groups.

“When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don’t have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration”, Patrick Finan, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement.

Mr Finan said this is important as interrupted sleep is something often experienced by new parents and on-call workers.

Finan warns that effects of fragmented sleep may be cumulative, as the findings suggest the negative emotional impact only gets worse on subsequent days if the sleeping pattern persists. The next nights, the interrupted sleepers had the same feeling and continued to have decline in positive feelings. The study appeared in the journal Sleep.

A study found a shorter, uninterrupted sleep is better than a longer, fitful snooze time.

Depressed mood is a common symptom of insomnia, but the biological reasons for this are poorly understood, according to Finan.

“Many individuals in insomnia achieve sleep in fits and starts throughout the night and they don’t have the experience of restorative sleep”. Statistics says that 10 percent of the population is insomniacs, many wakes up continuously throughout the night while a growing number of people are busy with their smart phones at night to put them down and sleep.