The Relationship Between Love and Sleep

Have you ever wondered how your romantic relationships affect your sleep? Not only do your relationships have a significant impact on your sleep, but your quality of sleep also directly impacts your romantic relationships. Let's take a look at the relationship between love and sleep.

The increased psychological state of being newly in love can do wonders for quality sleep and a feeling of being well rested. A study evaluating 60 adolescents who had recently fallen in love concluded that those in early-stage intense romantic love recorded fewer hours of sleep, increased sleep quality and lowered daytime sleepiness [1].

Not only do relationships have an effect on sleep, but sleep has an effect on relationships. Specifically, an increase in sleep fosters healthier and happier relationships.

A study which looked at the effect of a poor night’s sleep on the amount of conflict in a romantic relationship found that when participants slept worse than they usually do, they reported significantly more conflict with their partner compared to the nights they got a better sleep [2].

Another study found that sleep disturbances caused by a snoring partner enhanced agitation and tensions among couples, causing an increase in fights and negative emotions such as resentment rage and helplessness [3].

Along with causing conflict, poor sleep has also been seen to make people prioritize their own needs over their partners, making their partners feel unappreciated [4].

It is quite apparent that poor sleep has a negative effect on the health of a relationship, but luckily, the opposite was found for good sleep. This means that that the better sleep you have, the better your relationships!

A 443 participant study gathered data to determine a correlation between an individual's perceived higher sleep quality and a high level of satisfaction with their partner [5].

So there you have it! The better you sleep, the better you love, and the better you love, the better you sleep! 

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1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X07000262

2 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1948550613488952

3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1049732315583270

4 https://news.berkeley.edu/2013/01/19/sleep-couples

5 http://dx.doi.org/10.15446/revfacmed.v65n2.58396