Life Satisfaction Affects Sleep in Midlife
SEATTLE, Washington — Middle-aged adults who are more satisfied with their life are apt to fall asleep faster than their less satisfied peers, a new study hints.
In analyzing survey data from 3950 adults who took part of the Midlife in the United States II (MIDUS-II) study, researchers found that those with higher life satisfaction reported shorter sleep-onset latency (SOL).
"Life satisfaction is interlinked with many measures of sleep and sleep quality, suggesting that improving one of these variables might result in improvement in the other," lead author Hayley O'Hara, recent graduate of Ohio Northern University in Ada, told Medscape Medical News.
She presented her research, conducted under the supervision of Megan Clegg-Kraynok, PhD, at Ohio Northern, here at SLEEP 2015: the Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
A Hectic Time
In the MIDUS-II study, a 6-item life satisfaction survey was used to group participants as having low, medium, and high levels of satisfaction, and a subjective measure of minutes it takes to fall asleep was used to measure SOL. Participants had a mean age of 57 years, and 55% were women.
"I was interested in the midlife in the MIDUS-II dataset as they managed to collect a great amount of data from a population that is not as well studied," O'Hara said in an interview. "Midlife is a busy time in one's life with family, jobs and other responsibilities that make it difficult to recruit for any kind of research."
A review of the literature suggests there is a lot of research on well-being and sleep deprivation, she noted, "but not much within the facet of life satisfaction. Life satisfaction is one of many factors that are contained within well-being."
A one-way analysis of variance showed that the effect of satisfaction on SOL was significant (P < .001), with low life satisfaction related to delayed sleep onset during midlife, she reported.
Respondents with higher life satisfaction reported shorter SOL, and only those with high life satisfaction were within the normal range of SOL. "Sleep-onset delay among those with low life satisfaction could be the result of worry and anxiety," O'Hara said.
"This poster is fantastic. It's simple but it has a lot to say," Christopher Winter, MD, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, and member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, noted in an interview with Medscape Medical News. "It shows that how happy you are with your life correlates with how long it takes you to fall asleep," he said.
"If your house is being foreclosed on or your wife is cheating on you and you have a lot of things on your mind, it may take you a little while to fall asleep and but that's okay. The problem is that often these people will go to bed not when they are sleepy, but when they want to be done with the day," Dr Winter said.
He also said having some trouble falling asleep is not a reason to turn to sleeping pills. "People want to be able to control their sleep like a switch. When they get in bed at night at 11 pm, they want to fall asleep immediately. If they're awake for more than 5 minutes thinking about their life, they get depressed," Dr Winter commented.
"Some people get a powerful negative feeling when it takes them an hour or so to fall asleep," he added. "They think it's a problem, so much so that wanting to escape that negative feeling can easily make people commit to taking sleep pills for the rest of their lives. That's why a lot of people drink themselves to sleep, they want to check out quickly. If they don't, they see it as a failure," Dr Winter said.
A "key" message for these people: "worry less about it," he concludes.
The MIDUS II study is funded by the National Institute on Aging. The authors and Dr Winter have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
SLEEP 2015: Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. Poster 84. Presented June 8, 2015.
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