Your Mood and Your Sleep

Your boss yelled at you today, and it wasn’t even your fault. You had an awful commute and it took you almost two times longer than normal to get home. You just found out that they canceled your favorite television show. Whatever the reason, you are in a bad mood. And now you can’t sleep. The next morning, because you didn’t sleep well that night, you aren’t in a good mood. You know from experience there is definitely a correlation between your mood and your sleep.

Sleep deprivation, whether slight or significant, makes a person more prone to be angry and irritable. You may experience feelings of frustration or sadness when you don’t sleep well, and you may even feel stressed out. Experiencing depression due to lack of sleep is also not uncommon. In fact, one of the first visible symptoms of depression is often difficulty sleeping. It doesn’t help that going to bed angry can cause stress and/or anxiety which will often keep you awake.

You can try practicing yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, or even feng shui to help to calm your mood which in turn can help you to sleep. If you’ve tried everything and your emotions habitually cause you to not sleep well at night, it might be beneficial to speak to a medical professional. You can determine if depression is the cause of your sleeplessness, or if it’s something else. Together you can discuss how to better manage your feelings in order to help you achieve better sleep.

Though we can control how we react, it’s harder to control how we feel. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, lack of sleep can put us in a bad mood. Hopefully, just being cognizant of this will help us control our reactions when it does happen.