Poor Sleep Can Make You Feel Lonely

Poor sleep and feeling lonely are situations that are becoming more common. The latter has increased significantly. In the UK they even have a loneliness minister. Not sleeping well has become a fact for many people on earth.

It is unlikely that these phenomena are new to you. The novelty of this study, however, is that a link has been found between the two. The data seem to indicate that poor sleep causes a strong sense of loneliness.

While the study doesn’t mention it, other data shows that people who don’t cope well with loneliness often have trouble sleeping.

Poor sleep can lead to different emotions. You know that insufficient sleep affects your mood. This makes you feel unmotivated and irritable. Not sleeping well can even affect your ability to focus and maintain your attention.

The research we’ll be discussing today shows, as we mentioned above, that you can also feel lonelier if you don’t sleep well.

The Berkely University in California study: poor sleep and loneliness

Neurologists Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker of Berkely University in California conducted a fascinating study on the relationship between poor sleep and loneliness. They published their results in 2018 in the journal Nature Communications.

An earlier study with 140 volunteers provided the researchers with the first information. It turned out that after a night of sleep deprivation, the participants showed signs of feeling isolated and as if they had no one to talk to. Ben-Simon and Walker wanted to confirm and deepen those findings.

They asked 18 young people to sleep at home all night without interruptions. The next night they had to stay up all night in a lab. To prevent the volunteers from falling asleep for even a minute, they let them participate in many different activities.

Then they showed them a video of a person walking towards them. They asked the volunteers to press a button if they felt the person was getting too close. They found that participants stayed an average of 15% further away than if they had slept all night.

The Effects of Sleep Loss

Researchers also found that sleep loss triggered more activation in an area the brain associated with threat and danger when the person in the video got too close. In other words, they felt that getting closer to another was dangerous.

The study also found that volunteers who slept poorly had decreased activity in the brain regions associated with socialization. This means that they felt less motivated to interact with other people.

Study participants also said they felt more alone. As the study notes, “While numerous factors are associated with social isolation and withdrawal from interpersonal interactions, recent evidence suggests that insufficient sleep is one of those factors.”

Phase two

Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker conducted a second phase of their research, this time with 1,000 volunteers. They showed each participant videos of the 18 volunteers from the first experiment.

Each shot lasted a little over a minute and was simply a video about one of the volunteers talking about casual topics. Researchers presented them with a 10-point questionnaire.

They shot half of the videos after a good night’s sleep and the other half after the volunteers stayed up all night. However, this information was not shared with the second group of volunteers. They just showed them the videos in random order.

They then asked which of the volunteers seemed lonelier. Most viewers identified those who hadn’t slept. They also said they noticed that those people also had a lack of motivation or intention to socialize. 

The results of the study on poor sleep and loneliness

In the last part of the experiment, they asked the 1,000 volunteers to talk about their own feelings after watching the videos of the first 18 volunteers. The results were fascinating. Just watching the contestants who hadn’t slept made the spectators feel lonelier.

The researchers point out that loneliness was also “contagious” in a sense. Many participants indicated that they inexplicably felt more alone after watching a video of someone who was sleep deprived.

The conclusions that scientists draw from this is that poor sleep predisposes you to not being able to socialize properly. It also evokes feelings of rejection in other people. The good news is that a good night’s sleep is all it takes to make all of this disappear.