How did you sleep last night?
If you’re one of the almost 40% of Americans who regularly don’t get enough sleep, I feel you.
Whether it’s stress and life’s pressures, a health condition, or just not enough time for that well-needed shut-eye, getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep every night can be tough at the best of times.
And when you don’t get enough sleep – well, things can get a lot harder. Your concentration and patience can decline, leading to those everyday tasks feeling much harder. So can your resilience and self-esteem, and, annoyingly, the ability to sleep too.
We all know the benefits of a good night’s sleep which, psychologically speaking, is one of the most positive things you can do for both your body and mind.
And research fresh from the labs at Baylor University has some news: just 46 extra minutes sleep can be, quite literally, life changing. With the reported benefits including improvements in your well-being, with specific increases on gratitude, resilience, and kindness, that extra quarter of an hour could change everything.
Reflecting on the research – which was published in the academic journal The Journal of Positive Psychology – in a statement, Professor Sarah Schnitker explained just how transformative that extra sleep could be:
“Better sleep helps you to have a clear vision for your life and to be more resilient to the challenges that could happen tomorrow.”
So how did the researchers come to this magic number 46?
It all started in Baylor’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory, where researchers investigated how sleep affects mental wellbeing, measuring the correlation between increased sleep and positive psychology.
Observing the psychological changes in 90 young adults over the course of a week, the scientists sought to observe any increase in positive traits – including flourishing, resilience, and gratitude – by asking them to reflect on their feelings, and keep a gratitude journal.
This way of interpreting sleep is ground-breaking, the statement suggests, since previous work has usually taken a more negative approach, instead seeing the extent to which reduced sleep leads to negative psychological traits, as Schnitker explains:
“This study is exciting because it expands what we know about the health effects of sleep restriction and extension to include variables related to forming flourishing moral communities.”
And the results were as stark as you might expect, with those who increased their sleep feeling more psychologically positive, while those whose sleep decreased found their negative feelings to be heightened.
Baylor’s Dr Michael Scullin reflected on the staggering impacts of small tweaks to sleep patterns on the participants’ psychology:
“We saw that people who increased their sleep by 46 minutes a night ended up feeling more resilience, gratitude, life satisfaction, and purpose in life. When people were cut back on sleep by a mild average of 37 minutes a night, they experienced drops in mood, resilience, flourishing and gratitude.”
They found that the participants’ increased resilience and purpose led them to flourish in their lives, suggesting that with just little extra sleep we really can become the best version of ourselves. Many of the participants even found themself feeling more charitable, perhaps as a result of all that extra gratitude they were feeling.
Though 46 minutes extra sleep a night won’t make you a millionaire (at least not in the short term) it could be the secret to keeping you happy, healthy, and grateful for everything that you do have, as Scullin reflected:
“It turns out that getting more sleep has a broader influence than just feeling more alert during the day. Better sleep helps you to have a clear vision for your life and to be more resilient to the challenges that could happen tomorrow.”
So how about putting your phone away just a little earlier tonight, putting that sleep hygiene into good practice, and treating yourself to a little extra snooze time.
Your happiness could depend on it.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.