Can lack of sleep affect your mental health?
A bad night’s sleep can leave most of us irritable and grumpy. But what effect can lack of sleep have on our mood and thinking, and can it harm our mental health in the longer term?
We teamed up with the University of Oxford to run our own experiment to answer this. We recruited 4 volunteers with healthy sleep patterns and over 6 nights monitored whether reducing their sleep had any impact on their mental health.
For the first 3 nights they received 8 hours of undisturbed sleep, but for the next 3 nights we restricted their sleep to only 4 hours. They were required to follow their normal routine during the day. To establish how reduced sleep would affect them, they were asked to keep daily video dairies and complete psychological questionnaires designed to assess mental state.
The experiment revealed that after only 3 nights of restricted sleep, anxiety, depression and stress had all increased in our volunteers, as had feelings of paranoia and mistrust in others. In a striking case, one participant believed he felt fine, but the questionnaire revealed that his mental health was beginning to suffer.
The results from our small study reflect wider work carried out by the Oxford University team and illustrate just how quickly a lack of sleep can affect our mental wellbeing, even if we are unaware it’s doing so.
So what can you do to avoid your mental health suffering due to poor quality sleep? Take exercise during the day, have a wind-down routine, avoid looking at screens in the hour before bed and have a regular bedtime and waking up time.
If this doesn’t help, there are a range of treatments available, so see your GP.
