Sleep as stress relief
Does sleep count as stress relief?
When I give stress management workshops, participants sometimes list “sleep” as a stress management tool that they use. I’ll be honest: I’m often reluctant to agree.
I teach active coping strategies that help people navigate their stressors directly and get to the root of their problems. Sleep can be a way of avoiding stress, disengaging with the present moment, denying there’s a problem. After you sleep the problems will still be there.
But… sometimes sleep is a great tool. Instead of engaging with a stressor, arguing with someone, or trying to complete a task that we’re too tired to do well, sometimes the right choice is to disengage with the problem, get some sleep, and tackle it fresh in the morning. After all, a lack of sleep leads to many stressful situations in the first place.
As a neuroscientist, I can literally talk for hours about the importance of sleep. Here’s the bottom line: lack of sleep is bad for your brain.
Sleep deprivation negatively affects your cognitive skills, making you slower and worse at decision making.
As a comparison, lack of sleep can impair your driving as much as 2 alcoholic beverages! Ok, so imagine that you’re going through your day and your brain is impaired. Here you are trying to make good decisions at work, managing your family, navigating the roads, talking to friends, and everything else you do in a day. But the decision-making parts of your brain are disrupted. The neurons that help you focus on important details aren’t connecting properly. The wiring that usually helps you process information and make appropriate judgements isn’t sending the right signals. You’re going to end up making lots of little mistakes -or big ones!- and making decisions that you regret.
When we don’t sleep well, we are inefficient and have poorer judgement. And that results in the creation of a lot of stressful situations. Maybe you completed your assignment sloppily, and your coworkers had to fix it or your boss got mad. Now you’ve got relationships to repair. Maybe you accidentally trashed a reminder for a meeting at the kids’ school and you have to rearrange your schedule to make it up. When you make an error and you have to go back and fix it, short term problems become long term stressors.
Next, disrupted sleep habits can change everything about how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Because the brain is functioning differently with lack of sleep, we may perceive a situation differently than we would at another time. A joke isn’t funny, or a serious conversation is misinterpreted all because our brain didn’t connect some information. We’ve missed out on some body language, the quirk of a smile, a key phrase that was said. Other perceptual differences exist in the sleep deprived brain as well, everything from altered speech patterns to color differences. Yeah, we actually speak less clearly and see colors differently without a good night’s sleep! And a lot more besides. All these brain changes can lead to misunderstandings and ongoing stress.
You might know that you feel cranky or irritable without a good night of sleep, and that’s true. There’s lots of research on the effects of sleep on mood and behavior.
What’s amazing is some of the more recent research that shows how sleep deprivation and disordered sleeping habits are tightly linked to depression and other mood and anxiety disorders. Chronic sleep pattern disruptions can actually lead to symptoms of depression or anxiety. There are experiments underway demonstrating that some people see huge improvements in their depression and/or anxiety symptoms through treatment of their sleep.
This isn’t a miracle solution for everyone, of course, and a good night’s sleep doesn’t magically cure all depression, but learning and engaging in good sleep habits is supportive of other treatments with no negative side effects. So whether you are dealing with diagnosed mood and behavior issues, or are feeling irritable or down, sleep can improve the outcomes.
In summary, sleep can help us think more clearly, make better decisions, avoid arguments, and feel happier.
