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Even amongst 'evening types' who prefer to sleep later anyway, the study found they had had more repetitive anxious thoughts than those who kept regular hours.
The research, published in the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research, asked 100 adults about their sleeping patterns and gave them tests of persistent negative thoughts (Nota & Coles, 2014).
The tests assessed how much people:
- worried,
- obsessed,
- and ruminated.
Persistent negative thoughts are often associated with mental health problems.
People experiencing anxiety, depression, stress, OCD and social anxiety can find they have little control over negative thoughts continually popping into their minds.
While this study cannot tell us that better sleep causes improvements in persistent negative thoughts, clinicians frequently find that sleep helps.
Dr Meredith Coles, who co-authored the study, said:
"If further findings support the relation between sleep timing and repetitive negative thinking, this could one day lead to a new avenue for treatment of individuals with internalizing disorders.Jacob A. Nota, the study's lead author, said:
Studying the relation between reductions in sleep duration and psychopathology has already demonstrated that focusing on sleep in the clinic also leads to reductions in symptoms of psychopathology."
"Making sure that sleep is obtained during the right time of day may be an inexpensive and easily disseminable intervention for individuals who are bothered by intrusive thoughts."
Comment: Alternatively, since the study is correlational, it can't tell us if the poor sleep patterns cause the negative thoughts in the first place. It could be that people who experience these intrusive thoughts (for some other reason) just happen to go to sleep later (perhaps as a result of the negative thoughts, or some common cause). But the clinical data suggests that regularizing sleep patterns can help. So if you're experiencing such thoughts, try it out. And if you're not, try it anyway! The benefits from good sleep are legion: