New study suggests link between lower life satisfaction and sleep problems during midlife

A new study suggests that lower life satisfaction is linked to sleep problems during midlife.

Respondents with higher life satisfaction reported shorter sleep onset latency (SOL). Sleep onset delay among those with low life satisfaction could be the result of worry and anxiety, as reported elsewhere. These findings support the idea that life satisfaction is interlinked with many measures of sleep and sleep quality, suggesting that improving one of these variables might result in improving the other.

"These findings support the idea that life satisfaction is interlinked with many measures of sleep and sleep quality, suggesting that improving one of these variables might result in improvement in the other," said lead author Hayley O'Hara, recent graduate of Ohio Northern University.

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and will be presented Monday, June 8, in Seattle, Washington, at SLEEP 2015, the 29th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

The study group comprised 3,950 adults. Fifty-five percent were female and ranged in age from 17 to 74. A 6-item life satisfaction survey was used to code participants as having low, medium, and high levels of satisfaction, and a subjective measure of minutes it takes to fall asleep was used to measure SOL.