Why thinking you had a good night’s sleep is more important than actually getting one

Simply thinking you had a good night’s sleep is more significant to your mood than actually getting a good night’s sleep, a new study suggests.

The study, from the American Psychological Association-published journal Emotion, found that just feeling like you slept restfully improves well-being more than paying attention to targeted sleep goals and sleep trackers.

Researchers at the University of Warwick wanted to determine how changes to one’s usual sleep pattern and sleep quality correlate to mood and life satisfaction the following day.

“Our findings are consistent with our previous research that identified people’s self-reported health, and not their actual health conditions, as the main factor associated with their subjective well-being and especially with life satisfaction,” Professor Anu Realo, from the university’s psychology department, stated in a press release.

Researchers asked more than 100 study participants between the ages of 18 and 22 to keep a sleep diary over a period of two weeks.

The diaries included information about when the participant went to bed and started to get ready to fall asleep, how long it took to fall asleep, wake-up time and the time the diarist got out of bed and general satisfaction with sleep.

Participants wore actigraphs on their wrists to measure their movement and estimate sleep patterns and cycles.

“Even though a sleep tracking device might say that you slept poorly last night, your own perception of your sleep quality may be quite positive. And if you think that you slept well, it may help better your mood the next day,” lead author Dr. Anita Lenneis, also from the university’s psychology department, said.

She added, “On the contrary, if a sleep tracker tells you that you slept well, but you did not experience the night as such, this information may help you to reassess how well you actually slept. A sleep tracker offers information about your sleep which is typically not accessible whilst being asleep. So, it may improve your subjective perception of last night’s sleep and thereby your overall next day’s well-being.”

Those who participated were then asked to record and rate both their positive and negative emotions, as well as how content they were with their lives, five times throughout the following day.

The actigraphy data was compared to the subjects’ self-reported impression of their sleep and how they felt the next day.

“Our results found that how young people evaluated their own sleep was consistently linked with how they felt about their well-being and life satisfaction,” Lenneis said.

Lenneis continued, “For example, when participants reported that they slept better than they normally did, they experienced more positive emotions and had a higher sense of life satisfaction the following day. However, the actigraphy-derived measure of sleep quality which is called sleep efficiency was not associated with next day’s well-being at all.

“This suggests there is a difference between actigraphy-measured sleep efficiency and people’s own perception of their sleep quality in how they link to people’s evaluations of their well-being.”