Marriage and sleep study: Lack of sleep affects wives, husbands stoic!

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDJun 15 2011

According to a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Sleep Medicine Institute, wives can be irritable with their husbands if they don't get a good night’s sleep.

The team equipped 32 couples (average age, early 30s) with sensors that tracked their sleep patterns for 10 nights. And each day, they surveyed the husbands and wives to see how they were getting along.

The study found that women - but not men - tended to be more irritable and less positive with their spouses after a bad night’s sleep.

Michael Zande, a psychologist in Raleigh, N.C., who specializes in both marriage counseling and insomnia treatment, says that this study is indicative of the fact why wives are more likely to take their sleep troubles out on their husbands. Insomnia, he explained puts a person’s emotions on edge, and women tend to have “an especially strong emotional component” in their interactions with their husbands.

Zande says the study points to an important issue: A lot of marriages would be happier and smoother if the couple could really learn to sleep together (as opposed to “sleep” together, which is a whole different aspect of marital happiness). During marriage counseling, he always asks about sleep quality.  “If this study gets out, there could be a rush on high-quality mattresses,” Zande joked.

The study was presented at the SLEEP 2011 conference in Minneapolis.

“I don’t think that’s very surprising; I think we’ve seen it in ourselves,” says Lauren Hale, PhD, a sleep expert and associate professor of preventive medicine at the Stony Brook School of Medicine in Stony Brook, N.Y. Hale who was not involved in the research. “Most of us notice it in the reverse. If you’re really ill rested, you can be nasty to people.”

“Shorter sleep duration itself is not necessarily meaning that you sleep poorly,” says study researcher Wendy Troxel, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “Couples that have more positive interactions during the day may be engaging in other activities in bed at night,” she says.

“Women tend to be more sensitive to the highs and lows of relationships and they tend to be more communicative when they’re feeling the stress,” Troxel explained. “So the fact that women’s sleep problems affect both their own and their partner’s next day’s marital functioning may say something about women’s expressiveness, whereas men tend to kind of repress or withhold negative emotions,” Troxel added.

“We’re stoic,” says William J. Strawbridge, PhD, an adjunct professor in the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California in San Francisco. In a study published in 2005, Strawbridge also found that poor sleep was related to marital dissatisfaction. “It’s true that men just don’t want to talk about stuff like that and don’t seem as sensitive to it. Interaction in a marriage is more important to a woman than to a man,” he explained.