III. How does Good Sleep Relieve Anxiety? What do Studies Show?

You may sometimes sleep fewer hours or stay up all night due to worry or anxiety, however, lack of sleep can affect not only your mood, but all types of brain activity and physical health. Although people can experience poor sleep for any number of reasons, researchers believe poor sleep and anxiety go hand-in-hand. Poor sleep can make anxiety worse, and worry or anxiety can lead to poor sleep habits or insomnia. Regardless of your experience with anxiety, sleep is vital to your mental, social, and physical health, and this is corroborated by a wide history of research on sleep.

In terms of anxiety in general, higher levels of anxiety are associated with reduced sleep time and the time being awake in bed [8,11]. However, insomnia and anxiety is a chicken and egg problem. Researchers have found that:

• In general, insomnia symptoms precede anxiety in people with anxiety disorders.
• Anxiety and insomnia can also occur at the same time without one causing the other, especially in people with General Anxiety Disorder [8, 11, 12].
• People with anxiety and general worried thoughts have more difficulty overcoming insomnia, since the thoughts that keep them awake are general in nature, whereas people without anxiety only have to worry about falling asleep [10, 11].
• People who have poor sleep have lower perceptions of their quality of life and poorer mood in general [9].
• Insomnia can induce hostile responses, increase fatigue, and reduce cheerfulness and concentration at work [16].
• Insomnia is also associated with a need for psychiatric treatment for emotional problems after one year of sleep problems, whether you have a history of mental health problems or a diagnosis of a mental health problem prior to the start of insomnia symptoms [13].
• Sleep deprivation of 2 -3 days can lead to mood swings and increased tension.
• Some people can experience paranoia and hallucinations [3].
• Just a whole night of total sleep deprivation (no sleep for 24 hours), can dampen positive moods and increase negative moods [15].

These consistent findings about sleep and moods make it even more important for people already experiencing insomnia to address the problems caused by their anxiety concerns, because they may be at a greater risk for worsening behaviours, moods, and relationships pre-existing even before they had problems with sleep. Thankfully, the treatment of insomnia has been shown to also reduce anxiety symptoms [8].

Sleep deprivation at any level can affect your ability to make decisions, to co-ordinate exercise movements and to use your brain to the fullest. Comparison studies have shown that:

• The problem-solving ability and the testing of newly-learned information improve with a good night’s sleep, while studying without sleep decreases performance [1].
• Going without sleep for 24 hours had the same negative effects on driving ability as having a blood alcohol level of 0.10 [3].
• In gender comparison, sleep deprivation decreases risk-taking in women [4] whereas the ability to refrain from impulsiveness is reduced with sleep deprivation in men [14].

Low risk-taking may be a safer bet in most situations, the willingness to try can be important when doing something new or using new therapies for treating anxiety.

Poor sleep can also affect your efforts to be physically healthy and be positive in changes to better eating and exercising. Long-term partial sleep deprivation has been found to increase weight gain by 32% in women, and increase risk of heart disease by 39% when compared to women who have 7-9 hours of sleep per night [3].