Scientists conducting sleep experiments proved that being woken at intervals during the night is more detrimental to people’s moods than getting a shortened amount of sleep without interruption.
They studied 62 healthy men and women who were randomly subjected to three consecutive nights of either forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes or uninterrupted sleep.
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Dr Patrick Finan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore, US, said: “When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don’t have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration.”
The researchers’ findings are published in the journal Sleep.