Neuroscience
Just thinking that they’ve not had much sleep could interfere with the daytime functioning of imsomniacs, regardless of whether they actually had enough sleep or not.
Twenty-two students (average age 21 years) with primary insomnia were recruited by Christina Semler and Allison Harvey at Oxford University. All had experienced at least three nights’ sleep disturbance per week for the past month.
For three nights, the students’ sleep was measured using a sensitive gadget that records how much its wearer moves around. Each morning, an electronic display that the students thought was connected to this gadget, told them how well they had slept. But in fact the display was controlled by the researchers, so that they could trick the students into thinking they’d had a good or bad night’s sleep, regardless of how well they’d actually slept.
On days that the students were led to believe they’d had a poor night’s sleep, they reported having more negative thoughts (e.g. “I can’t cope today”), feeling more sleepy, performing more sleep-related monitoring (e.g. noticing aching muscles/ sore eyes), and resorting to more compensatory behaviours (e.g. taking a daytime nap). That’s despite the fact that the actual quality of their sleep didn’t vary significantly between days they were given positive or negative feedback about their sleep.
Together with past research showing imsomniacs often sleep much better than they realise, these findings suggest it could be their anxiety about not sleeping well, rather than a lack of sleep per se, that causes or worsens the daytime impairments so often reported by imsomniacs.
If these results can be replicated with a clinical sample, the authors said, then “…consideration should be given to teaching insomnia patients to lend less credence to their subjective perception of sleep. And the adverse consequences, for daytime functioning, of concluding that they’ve not obtained enough sleep should be emphasised”.
___________________________________
Semler, C.N. & Harvey, A.G. (2005). Misperception of sleep can adversely affect daytime functioning in insomnia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 843-856.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
You're feeling very sleepy
Just thinking that they’ve not had much sleep could interfere with the daytime functioning of imsomniacs, regardless of whether they actually had enough sleep or not.
Twenty-two students (average age 21 years) with primary insomnia were recruited by Christina Semler and Allison Harvey at Oxford University. All had experienced at least three nights’ sleep disturbance per week for the past month.
For three nights, the students’ sleep was measured using a sensitive gadget that records how much its wearer moves around. Each morning, an electronic display that the students thought was connected to this gadget, told them how well they had slept. But in fact the display was controlled by the researchers, so that they could trick the students into thinking they’d had a good or bad night’s sleep, regardless of how well they’d actually slept.
On days that the students were led to believe they’d had a poor night’s sleep, they reported having more negative thoughts (e.g. “I can’t cope today”), feeling more sleepy, performing more sleep-related monitoring (e.g. noticing aching muscles/ sore eyes), and resorting to more compensatory behaviours (e.g. taking a daytime nap). That’s despite the fact that the actual quality of their sleep didn’t vary significantly between days they were given positive or negative feedback about their sleep.
Together with past research showing imsomniacs often sleep much better than they realise, these findings suggest it could be their anxiety about not sleeping well, rather than a lack of sleep per se, that causes or worsens the daytime impairments so often reported by imsomniacs.
If these results can be replicated with a clinical sample, the authors said, then “…consideration should be given to teaching insomnia patients to lend less credence to their subjective perception of sleep. And the adverse consequences, for daytime functioning, of concluding that they’ve not obtained enough sleep should be emphasised”.
___________________________________
Semler, C.N. & Harvey, A.G. (2005). Misperception of sleep can adversely affect daytime functioning in insomnia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 843-856.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- "placebo Sleep" Can Boost Your Mental Performance
Believing that you've had a good night's sleep can influence your mental performance, regardless of how much sleep you actually had. That's according to a new paper, by Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal, who tricked students into thinking...
- Students: It's Time To Ditch The Pre-exam All-nighter
Lack of sleep impairs the human brain's ability to store new information in memory, researchers have found. Past research has already shown that sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material but now Matthew Walker and colleagues have...
- Fda: Insomnia Drug Approval
From the FDA: For Immediate Release: Nov. 23, 2011 FDA approves first insomnia drug for middle-of-the-night waking followed by difficulty returning to sleep [snippet] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Intermezzo (zolpidem tartrate sublingual...
- Sleep Deprivation And Learning
From the Science website: Asleep at the Memory Wheel By Greg Miller ScienceNOW Daily News 18 October 2006 ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding...
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["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New...