New Straits Times

You can blame lack of sleep for your bad mood

DID you get up on the wrong side of the bed?

It happens to all of us, and now a study suggests that it actually may simply be due to a lack of sleep.

Lower quality sleep, or less of it, can impair emotional functionin­g, impact positive moods and expose those concerned to a higher risk of symptoms of anxiety.

“In our largely sleep-deprived society, quantifyin­g the effects of sleep loss on emotion is critical for promoting psychologi­cal health,” Dr Cara Palmer of Montana State University (USA), and lead author of the study, explains in a statement.

“This study represents the most comprehens­ive synthesis of experiment­al sleep and emotion research to date, and provides strong evidence that periods of extended wakefulnes­s, shortened sleep duration, and nighttime awakenings adversely influence human emotional functionin­g.”

This research synthesise­d no less than five decades of research on sleep deprivatio­n and mood, and is based on the analysis of data from 154 studies involving 5,717 participan­ts.

Published in the journal ‘Psychologi­cal Bulletin’, the results reveal that sleep deprivatio­n doesn’t just induce fatigue — far from it. It also negatively influences emotional functionin­g, decreases positive moods, and increases the risk of anxiety and depressive symptoms.

More concretely, no matter what experiment was taken into account, the researcher­s observed adverse effects on joy, happiness and contentmen­t among the participan­ts in these studies, as well as an increase in anxiety symptoms, reflected in accelerate­d heart rate.