A long-term study suggests people with high levels of empathy get deeper, more restful sleep. Researchers link that connection to empathy’s role in improving emotional regulation.
Empathy for Better Health!
You can’t simply force yourself to become more compassionate and expect sleep problems to disappear. The researchers treated empathy as a stable personality trait rather than a quickly acquired skill.
To examine the link, researchers used data from a 37-year project that began in 1980. The study followed 3,596 young Finns born between 1962 and 1977. Their sleep patterns were assessed in 2001, 2007, and 2012.
The team focused on participants who completed empathy assessments in both 2001 and 2012, totaling 1,056 volunteers. All participants answered a temperament and character test developed by psychiatrist-geneticist Robert Cloninger, who is known for his work on personality types.
Volunteers were also evaluated with the Jenkins Sleep Scale and the Maastricht Questionnaire on Life Exhaustion, which measure sleep problems.
What Scientists Discovered
The study found that participants with the highest levels of empathy had the best sleep quality and lower anxiety. However, the researchers found no correlation between empathy and sleep duration, as reported by the Daily Mail.
Empathetic people tended to go to bed late and often had trouble falling asleep because of anxiety—worries like failing to call home or accidentally saying something inappropriate—but they still managed to sleep better, the researchers said.
The findings match earlier studies suggesting empathy supports emotional regulation, and better emotional regulation improves sleep quality.
The study’s conclusions were published in the journal Brain and Behavior.
What Other Researchers Have Said on This Topic
A 2019 study in Nature Human Behavior found that lack of sleep increases the risk of anxiety.
About 34 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 get less than seven hours of sleep per night; that share falls to 26 percent for adults 65 and older.
Other studies show men are slightly more likely than women to sleep less than seven hours a night: about 33.3 percent of men versus 32.1 percent of women.
