top of page
Search

The Inseparable Link Between Sleep and Well-being

Sleep problems are a significant and growing worldwide health issue, often described as a global epidemic. Sleep problems can be described as the difficulty in initiating or maintaining sleep or suffering from non restorative sleep. 


Sleep is fundamentally essential for numerous aspects of human function and well-being. It is a vital process that the body requires to repair itself and function properly. Sleep is not only a major activity that occupies about one-third of our lives, but it also affects our capacity to engage in all our daily activities and influences our behaviour.


Sleep problems impact daily occupations such as work, social performance, and overall well-being. Many studies conclude that less than 7 hours of sleep per day, for adults, is inadequate and is linked to decreased physical, emotional and cognitive function (Chaput et al. 2020).






How Sleep impacts Cognition:

  • Judgement: People who do not get sufficient sleep are more likely to make risky choices and may focus on a potential reward rather than downsides. It can be difficult to learn from these mistakes, since the normal method of processing and consolidating emotional memory is compromised due to lack of sleep (Killgore, Kamimori and Balkin, 2011 & Van Someran et al, 2015).

  • Decision making and adaptability: Sleep deprivation impairs decision making by reducing the ability to adapt and thrive in uncertain or changing circumstances (Harrison & Horne, 2000). A major reason this occurs is rigid thinking or "feedback blunting", in which the capacity to learn and improve on-the-fly is diminished (Whitney et al., 2015).

  • Attention: Lack of sleep affects a person's attention, as well as their learning and processing. A lack of sleep has also been found to induce effects that are similar to being drunk, which slows down thinking and reaction time cognitive performance, such as alertness, attention, memory, executive functioning and learning (Dawson & Reid, 1997).

  • Memory: Studies have found that people who are sleep deprived are at risk of forming false memories as both NREM and REM sleep are important for broader memory consolidation (Lo et al. 2016). Sleep helps consolidate memories and skills learned during the day. Without enough rest, recalling information or applying new knowledge becomes difficult.

  • Alzheimer risk: Studies indicate that sleep aids the brain in performing essential housekeeping tasks, such as removing potentially harmful beta amyloid proteins. In Alzheimer's disease, beta amyloid accumulates in clusters known as plaques, which deteriorate cognitive function. One study identified a significantly increased risk of Alzheimer's disease among individuals with sleep issues, estimating that up to 15% of Alzheimer's cases could be linked to inadequate sleep (Bubu et al., 2017).


The cognitive impacts of poor sleep can create important safety risks such as drowsy driving and medical errors. In fact, in a large study of two years of traffic fatalities and accidents in Canada, Charles Coren (1996), found that traffic accidents significantly increased the Monday after the spring switch to Daylight Saving Time due to lost sleep. Another study of medical residents found that those with less than 6 hours of sleep made 36% more serious medical errors compared to those who slept 8 hours. This shows how critical sleep is for jobs requiring cognitive demand (Ramier et al. 2024).







How Sleep impacts Physical Health:

  • Immune system: routinely sleeping less than 6 hours can change the way your body's natural defence against germs and sickness responds, substantially increasing your risk of certain forms of cancer (How Sleep Affects Your Health, 2022).

  • Weight gain: too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry (ghrelin) while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction (leptin). This makes you feel hungrier than when you're well rested leading to calorie intake, particularly from high-fat, sugary options, and a greater risk of weight gain and obesity (Greer et al., 2013).

  • Diabetes risk: sleep deficiency - even moderate reductions for just one week - disrupt blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic (Tiwari et al., 2021).

  • Growth and development: deep sleep triggers the body to release crucial growth hormone (GH) that promotes normal growth in children and teens. This hormone also boosts muscle mass and helps repair cells and tissues in children, teens, and adults (How Sleep Affects Your Health, 2022).

  • Physical athletic performance: lack of sleep affects physical sports performance by negatively impacting ones strength, speed, accuracy, and endurance. There is also increasing evidence that poor sleep is a good predictor for injuries and, more importantly, concussion (Charest & Grandner, 2020).



Image from: gosharpener.com
Image from: gosharpener.com


How Sleep Impacts Emotional Health:

  • Mood: sleep significantly affects mood, with poor sleep leading to increased irritability, stress, anxiety, and sadness, while also worsening symptoms of depression.

  • Aggressive behaviours: less sleep significantly increases aggressive behaviour by impairing emotional regulation, reducing impulse control, and heightening irritability, making individuals more prone to anger, lashing out, and acting impulsively. Sleep loss affects the prefrontal cortex, hindering judgement, and amplifies activity in emotional brain regions (Kamphuis et al., 2012).

  • Empathy: reduce sleep results in reduce empathy, making people less able to understand and respond to others' emotions, read facial expressions, and feel motivated to help, due to impaired brain function in areas related to social cognition and emotional processing (Gordon-Hecker et al., 2025).

  • Communication: less sleep severely impacts communication by disrupting emotional regulation, leading to difficulty finding words, misinterpreting others, slower responses, and more conflict. It makes you less empathetic, less expressive, and less able to understand complex language, affecting everything from daily conversations to crucial interactions (Holding et al., 2019).


For people with sleeping problems, improving sleep quality offers a practical way to enhance cognitive, physical and emotional ability. Getting the recommended amount of uninterrupted sleep can help the brain recuperate and avoid many of the negative consequences of poor sleep on diverse aspects of thinking, feeling and doing.



Sleep intervention:

While many people use over-the-counter sleeping pills or use alcohol or substances to cope with sleep problems, these methods can offer only a temporary or limited improvement of sleep quality, and the addictive and side effects may pose significant threats to health and well-being in the long run. In fact, lifestyle redesign and non pharmacological interventions are preferable for the treatment of most sleep disorders and chronic insomnia (Leland et al. 2014 & Khawaja et al. 2014).


In Occupational Therapy, sleep is conceptualised as a restorative occupation with the goal of rest and recuperation, and good sleep and rest has a significant impact on functional performance when it comes to self-care, work, and leisure during the day.


OTs are in fact specialists in assessing and intervening in a person’s physical and social environment along with a person’s behaviour and routines. We seek to optimize performance capacity in all three domains of health (physical, emotional and cognitive) by tackling the one occupation that takes up approximately one-third of our lives: sleep. 



Visit my blog post for more information on how Occupational Therapists are key health professionals for intervening on sleep issues:






References:

Comments

bottom of page