COLUMBUS – We are not at our best when we are short on sleep, but a pair of Ohio State researchers have found that loss of sleep is tough on our marriages and, potentially, on our health.
A lack of sleep puts you at risk for stress-related inflammation associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis and other diseases, said Stephanie Wilson, lead researcher on the study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology , and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, senior author and director of the OSU Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research.
They wanted to know how married couples fare when sleep-deprivation adds stress to their relationship.
“We know sleep problems are also linked with inflammation and many of the same chronic illnesses. So we were interested to see how sleep related to inflammation among married couples, and whether one partner’s sleep affected the other’s inflammation,” Wilson said.
They took blood samples from 43 couples who also told them how many hours they had slept the previous two nights. They had the couples try to resolve a topic that sparks conflict in their marriage and took more blood samples after the discussion.
“We found that people who slept less in the past few nights didn’t wake up with higher inflammation, but they had a greater inflammatory response to the conflict. So that tells us less sleep increased vulnerability to a stressor,” Wilson said.
The less sleep they got, the more likely the couples were to tangle.
For every hour of sleep lost, Wilson and Kiecolt-Glaser noted that levels of two known inflammatory markers rose 6 percent and the couples who used unhealthy tactics in their disagreements had a 10 percent increase with each hour of lost sleep.
They noted that about half of our study couples had slept less than the recommended seven hours in recent nights, which is higher than the national average. The CDC reports 35 percent of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep per night.
They were also pleased to note that if one of the partners was well-rested, or discussed conflict in a healthy way, they tended to neutralize the disagreement stirred up by their sleep-deprived partner.