Sleep and Social and Emotional Relationships

How Missing A Few Hours of Sleep Can Shift Your Tiniest Social Interactions

Sleep Is So Important For Our Social and Emotional Relationships

One thing that you'll never hear people talk about when it comes to sleep hygiene and sleep health is that it's so important for our social and emotional relationships. We already know that sleep is important for our cognitive restoration. We already know that sleep is important for our physical health.

But what we don't talk about is that sleep is the key feature that helps us interact with the people in our lives. Depending on the amount of sleep we get (and the quality of that sleep), our interactions and our perceptions of the interactions with people in our lives will change.

Sleep Science Jargon Can Make Understanding Useful Information Overly Complicated

Some of the scientific literature looking at sleep-restriction is dense to read and hard to decipher what exactly is being said. Even the phrase “sleep-restriction” isn’t a word that we would ever use when talking in an everyday setting. As a sleep scientist, it is definitely the correct word to describe the phenomena of we’re manipulating in the lab. However, as a regular human, the jargon makes me roll my eyes and leaves me want to shake scientists for not just saying something more plainly. When we talk about ‘sleep-restriction’ in the scientific literature, what we’re really asking is “What happens to people when they miss a couple of hours of sleep from their normal sleep schedule?”¹

One of my favorite studies looked at healthy adult sleepers and then asked them about their interactions the following day. In one group, the healthy adult sleepers got a full 8-hour opportunity window to sleep. In the other group they were in the "sleep restricted" group and were only allowed to have a 4-hour opportunity for sleep before they were awoken.

The results of this study are fascinating, but also, a bit hard (and frankly, kind of boring) to explain directly. If I were going to talk about the results of this research in a scientific way, I'd probably say something along the lines of "Sleep restricted adults were associated with perceiving more neutral interactions as negative, as compared to adults who were afforded an 8-hour opportunity window of sleep. Additionally, when assessing sleep-restricted adults the subsequent morning, they reported significantly more negative memories than neutral or positive memories when compared to their healthy-adult sleeping counterparts."

Not only is this a boring sentence to read and somewhat convoluted to understand, it's also a mouth-full². On top of those two things, the useful information doesn’t register in our brains very well, because it's hard to attach it to a meaningful interpretation to use this in our daily lives. Instead, I’ve found it’s much more useful for folx to have a concrete anecdote to see the meaning of these types of studies in real-time. For this particular body of research, I am a big fan of calling this scenario "the grocery store" example.

So without further ado—let's head to the grocery store.

The Grocery Store Example

Let's say we're a generally healthy adult sleeper. We had a luxurious and satisfying 8 hours of sleep last night and we are currently on our way to the grocery store. We're about halfway through our grocery shopping and we turn down the pasta aisle and at the other end we see someone who is an acquaintance. We don't really know this person super well, but we've maybe seen them a couple times around town and had relatively pleasant interactions with them every time we've seen them. We smile at them as they walk by, and they don't even acknowledge that we are there. We assume maybe they didn't see us, or that maybe they were having a tough day, or that perhaps something is preoccupying their mind. We continue grocery shopping and don't give it much more thought than that. We don't really think about it again.

That evening, we go to bed and in the morning we can recall more-or-less all of the details of the event.

When we are sleep-restricted, this simple scenario may look and feel significantly different.

Let's say we're a generally healthy adult sleeper, but we got woken up last night by our dog vomiting all over the kitchen floor. We were so worried about the color of the vomit that we drove them to the emergency vet and ended up only getting about 4 hours of sleep, instead of our usual 8. We're not terribly tired because we generally get good sleep but we don't have the luxury of taking the day off to recover from the night of lost rest. Sometime in the day, we are on our way to the grocery store. We're about halfway through our grocery shopping and we turn down the pasta aisle and at the other end we see someone who is an acquaintance. We don't really know this person super well, but we've maybe seen them a couple times around town and had relatively pleasant interactions with them every time we've seen them. We smile at them as they walk by, and they don't even acknowledge that we are there.

This feels unpleasant. Maybe even a little bit annoying. Actually, you've been pretty nice to that person and they couldn’t even be bothered?...fuck them. I can't believe they didn't smile back!

Or perhaps your mind starts to race around all of the things that happened the last time you saw them. Did you say something offensive? Are they mad at you? Maybe you think about approaching them in the coffee and tea asile and apologizing. It's probably not a big deal, but your brain starts to reach for every possible reason that your brief interaction with them didn't seem to go well.

Did I sleep with their ex boyfriend at some point and not know it? Was I rude to their mom on accident?

The thoughts are likely to continue to swirl significantly longer and perhaps come up several times throughout the rest of day.

When we go to sleep that night and wake up the next morning, we are more likely to only remember the awkward, difficult, or uncomfortable feelings that came up around that interaction. Our brains are more likely to selectively forget, or refrain from encoding generally neutral or positive memories from that day when we go to sleep that night.

So, what does this mean?

When we lose sleep for just one night, even when we are a generally healthy sleeper, our capacity for positive and neutral experiences diminishes. Now, before we get all doom and gloom about this, there is really important reason for it—it's a survival mechanism. I could nerd out with you in another essay at some point why this feature of our alert system has kept us alive for so long, but I think we can agree that in our modern society this is not a very useful feature of our brains.

In many ways, it has the potential to make our lives harder.

You could see that if someone was chronically under-slept, how it would change the climate of their own memories. When someone is chronically underslept, day to day life experiences objectively have less access to neutral or positive evidence that the world isn’t only full of negative experiences. You could see how this is likely to create more misunderstanding and conflict in our daily lives, especially in our closet relationships—not just the people we’re casually running into at the grocery store.

On top of this simple anecdote, a whole bunch of other things are going on biologically, as well. When we miss sleep we’re also more likely to have our circadian rhythm thrown off, our hunger patterns change, our cortisol and blood sugars shift in unhelpful ways, we have less ability to emotionally regulate ourselves and our emotions feel bigger than they normally might. The list goes on.

It might feel like an intimidating thing to tackle, especially if you’re already someone who might be prone to sleep-anxiety.

What do we do about it? Be Gentle.

Well obviously, one thing we can do about this is prioritize our sleep health as consistently as possible. The more consistent our sleep is, the less likely a scenario like this will happen. It is also less likely to continue as a downward spiral even if we miss one or two good nights of sleep every few weeks. We'll also be able to recover from it the next day more gracefully.

But sometimes, we cannot guarantee good sleep. Life is messy and unpredictable and sleep doesn't always come. We are imperfect little gremlins.

The next best thing we can do is recognize this is happening and be really fucking nice to ourselves knowing that our day might feel a little bit off. We mindfully be aware of this phenomenon and be gentle with the people around us and give them the benefit of the doubt during moments of conflict if we know that we (or they!) are under-slept.

When we have a difficult interaction or we notice our thoughts swirling on something we can very gently bring awareness to the reality that "oh yeah...I didn't sleep very well last night. This is supposed to feel more intense because of how my body evolved. That feels hard, and I understand why. What is the kindest thing I can do for myself (and my loved ones) today knowing that I might not be firing on all cylinders?"

Once you identify the kindest thing you can do for yourself (and your loved ones), do that, and get a good couple nights rest before making any big decisions. Your friends and family will thank you.

This sub-section of The Art of Rest, is all about—you guessed it—The Rest.

As a trained sleep scientist and mindfulness teacher & researcher, here we explore the everything related to rest. Whether we are unpacking the newest evidence-based sleep health tips, exploring day-to-day tools for bolstering and protecting rest, or diving into a world of dreams, “The Rest” is going to regularly touch into what a restful life is, and how to move towards one⁵

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Looking For A Personalized Way to Optimize Your Rest?

Exciting announcement! My books are now open again for the hibernation season! I am looking forward to giving winter guidance around sleep health & nervous system regulation around stress. I offer individualized 1:1 guidance for those who want to use rest as a way to expand their creativity, folks who just need a tune up, all the way towards people who might be dealing with chronic rest related issues. Shoot me an email at dagnyrose@theartofrest.me to inquire about getting started. Spring appointment slots begin March 10.

1. This can be looked at by going to bed a few hours later than we normally do, or waking people up earlier than they normally would. In the lab I worked in during graduate school, the way we would most often test this was by restricting people’s bedtimes and forcing them to go to bed later but still wake up at the same time as the people who did not have sleep restrictions.

2. Scientists, am I right?