Happiness and Sleep (Again)

GO TO BED, AMERICA. As a country we’ve racked up a pretty impressive sleep debt. I won’t bother with statistics here (but Gallup did here) because there are different ways to count sleep hours and different age groups need different amounts of sleep and every individual is different anyway so it’s actually pretty hard to make a statistic meaningful to the individual in this case. What’s meaningful is – do YOU feel like you’re getting enough sleep? Do you sometimes want to take a little midday nap? Science would support you even if your boss wouldn’t. This study shows that people who take an afternoon nap are less sensitive to negative emotions and more sensitive to positive ones, and the people who muscled through their day napless had the opposite experience. And then of course the napless group tended to have a lower mood towards the end of their day whereas the nappers had a decrease in negative mood, which any parent of a napping-age child could have predicted. So, go to the search box at the top right of this page and search “sleep” to read a few cardinal rules about how to get it, and then GO TO BED. GOOD NIGHT!