When a marriage is happy, men sleep less. But when women sleep less, the marriage is not apt to be so happy.
That's the finding of sleep researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who presented their work this week at SLEEP 2011, a conference concluding Wednesday in Minneapolis. It's the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
Both husband and wife reported more negative interactions the next day after a wife had trouble sleeping, according to the abstract of the research. Interestingly, when the man had trouble sleeping, it didn't seem to have the same effect on the marriage the next day.
shutterstock
The study noted that while most adults sleep with a partner, research tends to focus on an individual's sleep quality and how it affects him or her. This research looked at the effect of one's good-quality or poor sleep on each of them.
They took 35 healthy married couples, average age 32, who did not have "relevant, significant sleep, psychiatric or medical disorders," and examined the quality of their sleep over 10 nights. The marriage quality was assessed daily using electronic diaries that looked at four items considered positive marital interaction and four that were viewed as negative. The researchers examined the degree to which nightly sleep predicted the next day's marital interactions and how daily marital interactions predicted subsequent sleep quality and duration.
Their results found a stronger likelihood that sleep quality impacted next-day interactions than that interactions impacted sleep quality. "These findings have important clinical implications inasmuch as they highlight the potential interpersonal consequences of sleep disorders, such as insomnia," the researchers concluded.
WebMD, which also reported on the research, asked its reviewer what that might mean. "I don't think that's very surprising; I think we've seen it in ourselves," Lauren Hale, sleep expert and associate professor of preventive medicine at the Stony Brooke School of Medicine in New York, said. "Most of us notice it in reverse. If you're really ill rested, you can be nasty to people."
As for less sleep for men when the marriage is going well, "Shorter sleep duration itself is not necessarily meaning that you sleep poorly," study lead researcher Wendy Troxel, assistant professor of psychiatry at U. of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said. "Couples that have more positive interactions during the day may be engaging in other activities in bed at night."
Find the article HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment