If you’ve read any of the Counselling-related posts on the With a Little Help Counselling website you might have picked up on some running themes.
Things like how validation helps to build safety and intimacy in relationships, how people have two primary positions – I’m OK and I’m Not OK, and that never-to-be-diminished link between stress and emotionality.
Here’s another phenomenon that often comes up when working with clients – the link between exhaustion and our mental well-being.
We all have a certain amount of absorption, we can tolerate a certain amount, but push through that threshold and there is always a knock-on effect.
For example, I know that when I get tired I lose my optimism.
It is part of my self-awareness that with tiredness comes that less positive way of looking at things, and my patience diminishes too. That means I have to be careful not to stay up too late and not to overwork myself.
If I don’t, like clockwork, I know what will happen to me.
Now a study into the links between being tired and our mental health has been presented in the USA by the American Psychological Association.
The association wanted to find out what the links were between sleep deprivation and mood with researchers going to great lengths to help us better understand why our emotional functioning is so affected when we’re tired.
In the study, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, they synthesized more than 50 years of research on the topic, and study lead author Cara Palmer, PhD, of Montana State University says that makes this the most comprehensive examination of experimental sleep and emotion research to date.
“Our research provides strong evidence that periods of extended wakefulness, shortened sleep duration, and nighttime awakenings adversely influence human emotional functioning.”
To get to those findings, the researchers analyzed data from 154 studies spanning five decades. In all those studies, researchers disrupted participants’ sleep for one or more nights. In some experiments, participants were kept awake for an extended period. In others, they were allowed a shorter-than-typical amount of sleep, and in others, they were periodically awakened throughout the night.
Each study also measured at least one emotion-related variable after the sleep manipulation, such as participants’ self-reported mood, their response to emotional stimuli, and measures of depression and anxiety symptoms.
Overall, the researchers found that all three types of sleep loss resulted in fewer positive emotions such as joy, happiness, and contentment among participants, as well as increased anxiety symptoms such as a rapid heart rate and increased worrying.
“This occurred even after short periods of sleep loss, like staying up an hour or two later than usual or after losing just a few hours of sleep,”
“More than 30 percent of adults and up to 90 percent of teens don’t get enough sleep, and the implications of this research for individual and public health are considerable in a largely sleep-deprived society.”
So, if you’re not your normal self lately then better sleep could be a big help, the issue is that often external stressors, like relationship dysfunction, can be a major impediment to feeling relaxed and able to sleep soundly, and that could mean you’re trapped in a cycle.
