Wednesday, June 10, 2009

It’s Complicated: Sleep, Marriage & Relationships

Three studies that will be presented later this morning as posters examine the association between sleep and a couple’s relationship.

One study (#1248) reports that being stably married or gaining a partner is associated with better subjective sleep quality and objective sleep efficiency than being unmarried or losing a partner. The study’s lead author presented similar findings last year at SLEEP 2008, reporting that marital happiness may lower the risk of sleep problems in Caucasian women, while marital strife may heighten the risk. Read a press release about last year’s study. Earlier in 2009 in the journal Behavioral Sleep Medicine, the same team published their finding that happily married women reported fewer sleep disturbances, with the association evident among Caucasian women and to a lesser extent among African-American women.

Another study (#1295) involving 159,856 participants found that sleep disturbance is associated with being unmarried. The rates of self-reported sleep disturbance classified by marital status were 16.3 percent for married, 21.2 percent for divorced, 21.3 percent for never married, 22.8 percent for unmarried couple, 25.4 percent for widowed and 30.7 percent for separated. “Sleep disturbance” was defined as seven or more days of having trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or sleeping too much over the last two weeks. Less education, lower income and being unemployed also were associated with sleep disturbance.

A third study (#1285) reports that bidirectional associations appear to exist between sleep quality and interpersonal interactions of co-sleeping couples. Sleep problems at night may have a negative impact on relationship satisfaction the following day, while daytime interactions may influence the quality of sleep that night.

You can
download the SLEEP 2009 abstract supplement as an 11 MB file in PDF format.

8 comments:

  1. yeah its reall complicated the married will give you sleep sex disorder.

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  2. That's right, I think we can't ignore this complications, all is about couple’s relationship and their silly issues.I can't believe the result above, and neither this process, I mean, you could change the style to redact this edition, because I thought you did the worst post ever.

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  3. Snoring can affect the relationship, and also sleep apnea syndrome, where the person not only have a loud and irregular snore, but also stops breathing in sleep, then gasps for air, makes suddenly movements in bed, and strange sounds. This can scare the bed partner, and also disturbs him.

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  4. In my marriage the only moment when I found difficult to sleep was when my son Erick had two months! It was a horror (not him) and I was all day sleepy cause I could not close my eyes for 30 minutes!

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  5. If it is taken for more than two weeks you can beome addicted.Then the problems become much worst than the original.After using it for five years I am still trying to get off of it without results. Sleeping is nearly impossible without using extremely large doses of Ambien, and this creates additional emotional, physical and psychological problems.

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