If you wake up several times per night, then you are more likely to be in a bad mood the following day. Researchers assessed the mood of 62 men and women over three consecutive days. Each night participants had either a normal bedtime with forced awakenings or a later bedtime with uninterrupted sleep. By the second day, those in the forced awakenings group had a 31% reduction in positive mood, compared with a 12% reduction for those in the later-bedtime group. Lead author Dr. Patrick Finan explains, “When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don’t have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration.”
Sleep, October 2015