Our well-being is dependent on our life situations- doesn’t matter if we’re awake or asleep. We already saw in another article:Can Our Work Routine Affect Our Well-Being?that there’s a link between mental health and the timing of our sleep. Is there more to it? How does sleep exactly affect us?
Two professionals set out to discover more about this topic- they studied a sample of 100 people to find out how Repetitive Negative Thinking (RNT) influences our sleep.
It’s when we only focus on our problems, worries, and hard-to-control experiences. We worry about the future or think about past events too much.
They saw that shorter sleep duration is linked to overthinking- in other words, the less we sleep, the higher our negative thinking levels get.
Sleep deprivation is linked to increased overthinking and bad moods.
Sleep duration is not just something that makes us be in a good or a bad mood, it can affect our ability to control negative thoughts as well.
There’s a significant negative relationship between sleep duration and overthinking; the more we worry ourselves with negative thoughts the less we’re able to sleep.
How long we sleep for is important, but the timing is, too:
Eveningness ( when we prefer to sleep later in the day) also has negative effects on mental health.
Those who said they were morning-types (or neither a morning person nor a night owl) had lower levels of negative thinking.
Lack of sleep can get us to have more negative thoughts, but the link goes both ways; if we worry a lot before we sleep, the quality of our sleep will be worse too.
If our sleep timing and duration have a big impact on our mental health and outlook on life, we can make sure that we get enough sleep during the right time of day.
This could be a very inexpensive way of making sure we control our intrusive, unwanted thoughts and worries- which leads to us being happier and healthier hum
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