Tip: To manage stress, sleep better. To sleep better, keep a good routine and manage stress.

Disrupted routines and worries about coronavirus have made it harder for us to sleep this year. For example, reports suggest there was a 15% increase in prescriptions for sleep medication prescriptions at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S., and a 37% increase in insomnia in China. Importantly, if you’ve been feeling out of sorts over the past few months, the lack of sleep could be partly to blame. According to new research conducted before the pandemic, sleep deprivation dampens our enthusiasm about positive events, and makes it harder to find the silver linings when we’re under stress. In the paper, published earlier this year in Health Psychology, researchers surveyed nearly 2,000 adults in the United States. For eight days, participants received a phone call each evening in which they were asked to report how much they’d slept the night before, whether they had experienced any stressful or positive events, and their overall levels of positive and negative emotions. When participants got more sleep, they had higher levels of positive emotions and lower levels of negative emotions the next day. Moreover, sleep impacted how the events of the day affected them. On days when participants had a stressful event, their positive emotions took less of a hit if they’d gotten a good night’s sleep beforehand. And, on days when good things happened, participants experienced an even greater boost in positive emotions if they were well-rested. These benefits were even mor...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain/ Mental Health emotionally Emotions improving sleep insomnia psychologically Stress Source Type: blogs