Good-quality sleep can enhance mental toughness and resilience. Anna Berkut / Alamy Stock Photo
Does good-quality sleep enhance the mental toughness and resilience of individuals? That’s the question that an international research team involving United Arab Emirates University has been investigating.
Working with colleagues from Zayed University, University of Birmingham, University of Oxford and the University of Arizona, researchers from UAEU have performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the scientific literature to try and ascertain if good quality sleep can increase a person’s ability to effectively deal with stress.
“A lot of sleep research indicates that poor sleep typically results in a reduced capacity to effectively regulate negative emotions.Impaired regulation can lead to negative emotions spiralling and the person feeling overwhelmed and less able to cope,” explains Ian Grey from the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UAEU. “We speculated that therefore the opposite may also be true—that good sleep increases people’s ability to emotionally regulate and effectively deal with stress. In other words, we thought that sleep could be related to what psychologists’ call resilience.”
Their investigation focused on a total of 68 published sleep studies around the world involving 131,820 individuals, with 5 studies being excluded from detailed analysis due to lack of sufficient information. Any studies involving animals, infants, or those with sleep disorders were screened out at an early stage.
“What we found was that good-quality sleep results in people reporting higher resilience,” adds Grey. “While sleep is not the only factor affecting resilience, our results would indicate that it may well be one of the ‘big players.’”
As for why and how sleep could be important for resilience, one explanation the researchers put forward is that good-quality sleep and good sleep habits may result in better hormone regulation, especially of cortisol, a well- known stress hormone. However, more studies and analysis are needed to fully understand the mechanisms involved and the level of causality between sleep and resilience.
The research was part of a larger project examining the role of sleep in a range of clinical conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depersonalization, and recovery from stroke. After recently publishing their findings in Sleep Medicine Reviews, a top-ranking neurology journal, the team now plan to conduct additional studies looking at the individual components of mental resilience.