Lack Of Sleep Can Make You Feel Lonely

Lack of sleep and feelings of loneliness are situations that are becoming more common. The latter has increased markedly. In the UK, there is even a lone minister. Not sleeping well has also become a fact of life for many people on the planet.

It is unlikely that any of these phenomena are new to you. The new thing about this study, however, is that it has found a link between the two. The data seem to suggest that lack of sleep triggers a strong feeling of loneliness. Although the study does not address this, other data show that people who have difficulty coping with loneliness often have difficulty sleeping.

Lack of sleep can lead to different emotions. You know that if you do not get enough sleep, it will affect your mood. It makes you feel unmotivated and annoyed. Not sleeping well can also affect your ability to focus and maintain your attention. The study we are talking about today shows, as we mentioned above, that lack of sleep can also lead to you feeling more lonely.

Berkeley’s study on lack of sleep

Neurologists Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker from the University of California at Berkeley conducted a fascinating study on the relationship between lack of sleep and loneliness. They published their results in the journal Nature Communications in 2018.

An earlier study with 140 volunteers gave the researchers the first information. It found that after a night without sleep, the participants showed signs that they felt isolated and as if they had no one to talk to. Ben-Simon and Walker wanted to confirm and develop these results.

To do so, they asked 18 young people to sleep through the night at home without interruption. The next night they had to stay awake all night in a laboratory. To prevent the volunteers from falling asleep for even a minute, they had to participate in several different activities.

Then they showed them a video of a person walking towards them. They asked the volunteers to press a button when they felt the person was getting too close. They found that the participants on average stayed at a 15% greater distance compared to when they had slept all night.

The effects of lack of sleep

The researchers also found that lack of sleep triggered more activation in an area that the brain associated with threats and danger as the person in the video got closer. In other words, they felt that being close to another person was dangerous.

The study also found that volunteers who slept poorly had reduced activity in the brain areas associated with socialization. That is, they felt less motivated to interact with other people.

The participants in the study also said that they felt more alone. As the study mentions: “Although there are many factors that can be associated with social isolation and withdrawal from interpersonal interactions, suggests new evidence that insufficient sleep could be such a candidate”.

Phase two

Eti Ben-Simon and Matthew Walker conducted a second phase of their study, this time with 1,000 volunteers. They showed videos of the 18 volunteers from the first experiment for each participant. Each recording lasted just over a minute and simply showed one of these volunteers talking about informal topics. The researchers guided them using a 10-point questionnaire.

They recorded half of the videos after a good night’s sleep and the other half after the volunteers had been up all night. However, they did not share this information with the other group of volunteers. They simply showed them the videos in random order. Then they asked which of the volunteers seemed more lonely. Most viewers identified those who had not slept. They also said that they noticed that these people also seemed to have a lack of motivation or intention to socialize.

The results of the study

In the last part of the experiment, they asked the 1,000 volunteers to talk about their own feelings after watching the videos of the first 18 volunteers. The results were fascinating. Just looking at the participants who had not slept made the spectators feel more lonely.

The researchers point out that loneliness was also “contagious” in a way. Many participants expressed that they inexplicably felt more lonely after watching a video of a person deprived of sleep.

The conclusion reached by the researchers is that lack of sleep predisposes you to less socialization. It also triggers feelings of rejection from other people. The good news is that a good night’s sleep is enough for all of this to go away.