Better Sleep Cures Loneliness — Especially for Younger Adults

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by StudyFinds.

A good night’s sleep can often be the cure for all sorts of ailments. Now, new research finds getting better sleep may also be the best medicine for loneliness.

A new study being presented at the SLEEP 2024 annual meeting found a link between quality sleep and lower levels of loneliness. The benefits were most helpful among younger adults.

“Loneliness is an urgent public health crisis, and there is a pressing need for providers to better understand and treat it,” says Joseph Dzierzewski, the vice president of research at the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the principal investigator of the study, in a media release.

Researchers recruited 2,297 adults, with an average age of 44, to complete an online sleep health questionnaire and an examination of their levels of loneliness. The study showed that getting a good night’s rest helps people feel more connected to others. Specifically, the new research published in SLEEP found that better sleep health is linked to lower levels of emotional, social, and total loneliness. The effects were seen across adults of all ages.

“Our results highlight the important role that sleep plays in understanding loneliness across the adult lifespan. Perhaps efforts to improve sleep health could have a beneficial effect on loneliness, especially for young people,” explains Dzierzewski.

The authors did not explain why younger adults appeared to benefit more from sleep’s effects on reducing loneliness than other adults. However, they note that this is an intriguing observation worth investigating further.

Source: StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/better-sleep-cures-loneliness/