Sleeping Too Much May Negatively Impact Well-Being in Adults With Depression

A study in BMC Psychiatry investigated the impact of sleep duration and daily well-being in adults with depression. Both too little and excessive sleep were found to impact daily affect.

The study utilized data from the second wave of the National Study of Daily Experiences, which included 2012 adults. Participants completed 8-day diary interviews via telephone, reporting on their daily experiences such as sleep duration and negative and positive affect. In addition, they completed the Composite International Diagnostic Interview-Short Form assessment, and depression status was assessed via the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition. To measure affect, patients used a 5-point scale to rate the frequency of 13 items of positive affect (eg, feeling in good spirits, calm and peaceful, close to others, active, confident) and 14 items of negative affect (eg, feeling restless or fidgety, worthless, hopeless, lonely, ashamed).

The average sleep duration was 6.94 hours for adults with depression and 7.15 hours for those without depression. Compared with adults without depression, those with depression reported greater fluctuations in daily affect in relation to their sleep duration. The authors noted a nonlinear relationship between daily sleep duration and affective well-being, with greater deviation when participants slept 2 or more hours fewer or more than their typical sleep duration. Additionally, participants with depression were more likely to report sleep loss (sleeping less than 6 hours; 19.3% vs 11.7% in those without depression) and excessive sleep (sleeping more than 9 hours; 6.4% vs 3.8%).

“Depressed individuals were more responsive to having a lack of sleep than nondepressed individuals with regard to daily affective well-being, which suggests that depressed individuals might have more heightened affective reactivity to a lack of sleep,” the authors wrote. They also noted that depressed individuals demonstrated decreased positive affect and increased negative affect after sleeping too much.

“These findings highlight the importance of sleep duration as a potential target for interventions improving affective well-being among depressed individuals on a daily basis,” the authors concluded.