Interrupted Sleep Leads To Bad Mood: Study

A new study claims that people who go to sleep late have improved moods the next morning as compared to those who got to bed early but have an interrupted sleep.

According to the study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine Financial Spots, being interrupted during sleep affect a person's mood more than not getting enough sleep, reported the Independent.

For the purpose of the study, the researchers recruited 62 healthy men and women who were tested on three sleep experimental conditions in an inpatient clinical research suite. The participants were subjected to three consecutive nights of forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes and uninterrupted sleep.

The researchers then questioned the participants on how they felt after their sleep on a range of positive and negative emotions such as happiness, irritation and anger.

It was found that people who were subjected to forced awakening had a 31 percent reduction in their positive mood while the group who were subjected to delayed bedtime faced an almost 12 percent reduction in their positive mood in comparison to their first night, said DailyMail.

Patrick Finan, lead author of the study, said, "When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don't have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration."

Patrick is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

He also said that the findings of the research can likely be applied to insomnia patients even though the study was conducted on healthy adults.

 "Many individuals with insomnia achieve sleep in fits and starts throughout the night, and they don't have the experience of restorative sleep," said Patrick.

"You can imagine the hard time people with chronic sleep disorders have after repeatedly not reaching deep sleep."

The findings of the research were published in the journal Sleep.