Poor Sleep Can Cause A Strong Feeling Of Loneliness

Loneliness and union problems are growing difficulties in our modern society. Loneliness in particular has increased considerably; in the UK, for example, a “Ministry of Loneliness” has been set up. In addition to this, poor sleep is a major problem that has become a very common fact around the world.

What is new to many of us as new knowledge is that a study at the University of California, Berkeley, has found a connection between these two phenomena. Apparently, poor sleep can cause a strong feeling of loneliness. And although the study does not mention this, we already know that when a person is unable to control feelings of loneliness, he or she usually also has problems with rest.

Poor sleep triggers a real storm of emotions. Clearly, lack of sleep affects mood: it reduces motivation, makes us feel irritated, and then we are also likely to have greater difficulty controlling and maintaining our attention span. The research we’re talking about in this article has shown that poor sleep also increases the feeling of loneliness.

Research from the University of Berkeley

This study, conducted by the University of California, Berkeley and led by neurologists Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker, explored the relationship between poor sleep and feelings of loneliness. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications in 2018.

A previous study involving 140 volunteers had already shown that after a poorly slept night, individuals blamed this on their own sense of isolation and that they had no one to talk to. In this more recent study, neurologists Ben-Simon and Walker wanted to confirm and refine these findings.

To succeed in this, they asked 18 young subjects to sleep uninterrupted all night at home. The next night they again had to be awake in the laboratory. To achieve this, they were given a lot of activities so they wouldn’t fall asleep for a moment.

Afterwards, the subjects were shown a video. In that video, an outsider could be seen walking towards the subjects from a distance of 3 meters. They were asked to press a button when they felt an outsider was too close. The results showed that the subjects stayed on average 15% further away from the outsider compared to people who had slept the night before.

Effects of poor sleep

The researchers also found that an area in the volunteers’ brains activated by a sense of threat was activated as the person in the video approached the camera. In other words, they perceived the intimacy of others as a risk.

Similarly, it was found that the amount of activity decreased in areas of the brain associated with socialization. In other words, these individuals felt less motivated to interact with other people.

Volunteers, for their part, also expressed loneliness. One researcher who participated in the study has explained the phenomenon as follows: “ The less we sleep, the less we want to interact with others. And when we avoid social life, it further increases the consequences of lack of sleep in human interaction. ”

Another revealing experiment

Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker took the experiment to the second phase, this time with 1,000 volunteers. All of these volunteers were shown videos showing 18 volunteers from the previous experiment. Each recording lasted a little over a minute and in them each of these volunteers talked about random topics guided by a questionnaire of 10 questions.

Half of the videos were recorded after the first night of sleep and the other half of the videos after the volunteers had spent the whole night awake. However, viewers were not told which videos were filmed before the supervised night and which videos again after. Volunteers simply completed the videos in random order – whether they were shot after a well-slept night or a sleepless night.

Volunteers were then asked which of the participants looked more lonely; most of these viewers identified those who had not slept among these options. They also expressed that they did not see any motivation or desire in these individuals to seek interaction with these people.

Research results

Towards the end of the experiment, these volunteers were asked to report their own feelings after watching the videos of the first 18 participants. As a result, watching the recordings featuring those subjects who had not slept evoked feelings of loneliness in the viewers as well.

The researchers found that the feeling of loneliness was somewhat “contagious”. Several expressed that for some inexplicable reason, they felt more lonely after watching a video of a sleepless person.

In summary, poor sleep has a negative effect on an individual’s social interaction with others, and in addition to this, it also causes feelings of rejection in other people. Fortunately, the good news for us is that one well-slept night is enough to make the negative effects we list go away.