Sleep deprivation isn’t just bad for your health, it’s also making you a toxic friend.
As a result of the pandemic, many Americans are experiencing insomnia at elevated rates — especially parents, whose busy schedules were already prone to bouts of sleepless nights.
“I get up now hours before my kids to get a few hours of writing and work done,” University of Pennsylvania professor of sociology and demography Courtney Boen told Vox for a recent piece on how COVID-19 has turned the US into a “nation of insomniacs.”
“I know I’m not alone,” she added.
While the pandemic emphasized the importance of sleep for many, it also caused many to have fewer hours of it. Whether that be due to a sudden lack of child care or insomnia from the stress of fearing the novel coronavirus, multiple data points appear to reveal that the pandemic has been a particularly sleepless time for already tired Americans.
These include the fact that sales of sleep supplement melatonin soared by 42.6 percent in 2020. “That consumer behavior is a sign that people are struggling,” clinical psychologist Jennifer Martin told Vox — and that, in April and May, US Google searches for the word “insomnia” increased dramatically, one study found.
It’s common knowledge that not getting enough sleep isn’t good for the human body or mind, but many are unaware of just how much damage it may be doing to their relationships, which may already be strained from going on two years of lockdown.
Not getting enough sleep makes humans significantly more antisocial, a team of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley previously discovered in 2018. While the correlation may seem relatively obvious, scientists have found that the correlation is surprisingly direct.
“The less sleep you get, the less you want to socially interact,” said study senior author and UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience Matthew Walker in a press release at the time. “In turn, other people perceive you as more socially repulsive, further increasing the grave social-isolation impact of sleep loss.”
The repercussions of people not getting enough sleep, Walker believes, go further than just sabotaging individual friendships: He and his team found that a lack of sleep may be fueling the current loneliness epidemic.
“That vicious cycle may be a significant contributing factor to the public health crisis that is loneliness,” he said.
For their 2018 study, Walker and his team measured how close 18 healthy young adults allowed strangers to get to them based on their quality of sleep the previous night.
Sleep-deprived patients, scientists found, kept an approaching person at a significantly greater distance away – between 18 and 60 percent further back – than when they had been well-rested.
“It’s perhaps no coincidence that the past few decades have seen a marked increase in loneliness and an equally dramatic decrease in sleep duration,” said study lead author Eti Ben Simon. “Without sufficient sleep we become a social turn-off, and loneliness soon kicks in.”
The good news is that it doesn’t take much to avoid the social downsides of being sleep deprived.
“On a positive note, just one night of good sleep makes you feel more outgoing and socially confident, and furthermore, will attract others to you,” Walker said.