Effects of pre-sleep negative mood on subsequent sleep

Objectives: Untreated disrupted sleep is an important precursor for the development of depression. Several studies have confirmed the negative impact of pre-sleep cognitive and emotional activity such as worry and negative affect on subsequent sleep. Emotional stress may affect latencies to sleep onset, to REM-sleep and other markers of sleep disruption such as arousals. The way we cope with emotional stressors and events may have important effects on subsequent sleep. Methods: In this study we investigated the effects of a failure-experience on polysomnographically recorded sleep in volunteers. Furthermore we explored whether dispositional coping factors such as emotion regulation moderate this effect. Results: In contrast to the control condition the effect of the failure induction was clearly observed in emotional experience as well as within the physiological sleep architecture. Furthermore, we notice a tendency in which not only emotional experience, but also sleep physiology was affected by low and high emotional approach as emotion regulation style (cf. Stanton, 2000). Conclusions: The present study has shown that emotional stress as a failure experience before sleep-goes together with a worsening of mood, an increase of level of rumination and enhanced sleep fragmentation with a moderating effect of emotion regulation as dispositional factor