Getting a good night’s sleep is a must for your mental health, wellbeing and resilience but if you’re a problem sleeper, it’s not as easy as it seems. A recent review suggests sleep is more complex than we think. We all have different health factors, environmental stressors and personal circumstances that impact both the quality of our sleep and how long we sleep.

So what are the basic requirements for sleep?

• good ventilation

• darkness

• regular bedtime

• comfortable bedding

• roughly 7-8 hours a night

And if you’ve ever woken up feeling like you haven’t slept a wink or you feel sleepy during the day it’s generally because your sleep quality is impaired. Check out this video from www.sleepfoundation.org

What about sleep and mental health?

Poor quality sleep can actually cause mental health problems and mental health problems can reduce the quality of your sleep. For many sufferers, it’s a never-ending cycle of one thing impacting the other. The Sleep Foundation reports;

• 75% of depressed people show symptoms of insomnia

• Poor sleep can activate anxiety in people who are a high risk for it

• Children and adolescents with ASD have a higher prevalence of sleep problems including insomnia and sleep-disordered breathing.

So how does gratitude improve our wellbeing?

Gratitude is one of the most well studied interventions for generating a sense of optimism, relieving depressive symptoms and reducing worry. It also helps us to be more pro-social, strengthening our bonds with other people. A new study of school children, in a program designed to address online bullying, showed that positive changes in bullying behaviour were more sustainable when combined with gratitude practice.

Another study conducted by sleep researchers looked at the effects of gratitude practice on sleep just before bedtime and discovered that people who practised gratitude each night over a ten week period found they were;

• Happier and more optimistic about life

• Kinder towards other people

• Did more exercise

• And experienced less illness

• Less worried and the quality of their sleep improved

3 Good Things - OK, Let’s do this!

If you like writing, try a gratitude journal or notebook by the bed. If you’re more of a visual person, you might like to draw in the journal, rather than write, this works really well for children as well.

There’s lots of things you can appreciate and be thankful for when you really think about it, here’s a few prompts to get you started;

• nature and places

• specific people in your life

• opportunities to work or study

• resources like good food and housing

• health and happiness

• friends and family

• someone you just met

Choose 3 good things from your day. Next, think about each one more specifically;

• Why are you grateful for them/it?

• How do they/it make your life better?

• Write it down or do a drawing

• Notice how it makes you feel

Practising gratitude just before you go to sleep can help you dial down the worry and ruminating thoughts and replace them with thoughts that raise your psychological wellbeing. And if you do this practice last thing at night you just might sleep more soundly too. Happy Snoozing!

Stay safe and well

Kim

References

Chamizo-Nieto, M. T., Wallace, A., & Rey, L. (2023). Anti-cyberbullying interventions at school: Comparing the effectiveness of gratitude and psychoeducational programmes. The Journal of Positive Psychology, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2170821

Philippens, N., Janssen, E., Kremers, S., & Crutzen, R. (2022). Determinants of natural adult sleep: An umbrella review. PloS One, 17(11), e0277323–e0277323. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277323

Sleep Foundation (2023). How To Know If You Got A Good Night’s Sleep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph3PqgF47rw

Sin, N. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: a practice-friendly meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(5), 467–487. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20593

Suni, E. (2023). Mental Health and Sleep, Sleep Foundation. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/mental-health

Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., Lloyd, J., & Atkins, S. (2009). Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 66(1), 43–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2008.09.002