How did you sleep last night? For many people, the answer is “not great.” In the U.S., about a third of people get fewer than seven hours of shut-eye, which is the minimum recommendation. Most of us are familiar with the unpleasant results. We may feel groggy and grumpy, and everything gets just a bit harder to do. But sleeplessness also impairs parts of the brain that affect our social lives and abilities to relate to other people, according to research by neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. People who sleep less are less likely to help others, for instance. Ben Simon spoke with Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas to discuss what the social consequences of bad sleep are and how good sleep can be leveraged to benefit well-being.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
In past research, you and your colleagues have found that lack of sleep contributes to anxiety and difficulty managing emotions. In addition, you’ve recently found that poor sleep affects social interactions, regardless of mood. How does that work?
People are less interested in social interaction when they’re sleep-deprived. For example, we designed a task where an experimenter and participant would face each other, and they would walk toward each other. The participant would decide when someone got too close, and we would measure that distance. Consistently, when people were sleep-deprived, they preferred others to be farther away.
— source scientificamerican.com | Oct 14, 2022