Protect Your Sleep
The Emotional Maintenance Series
This series explores ten simple, science-backed habits that can dramatically improve your emotional life. None of them are complicated. Most take only a few minutes. But together they create the conditions that help your brain regulate emotions more effectively.
Here are the ten habits:
Take a 10-minute walk (read here)
Drink enough water (read here)
Protect your sleep
Move your body
Spend time in nature
Eat real food
Ask better questions
Diagram an emotional incident
Solve one small problem
Write about your core beliefs
Each week, I go deeper into one of these ten. This week it’s…
Number three: Protect your sleep
Researchers have regularly examined how disrupted sleep affects emotional functioning. In one recent study,1 a team of researchers focused on a specific type of disruption called fragmented sleep, which occurs when people wake up repeatedly during the night (so it feels like they’re asleep but in reality they are waking up regularly for small amounts of time). Over twelve consecutive nights, participants wore sleep monitors to track their sleep.
The researchers then measured participants’ mood and their ability to regulate their emotions the following day. Participants who experienced fragmented sleep were significantly more likely to ruminate (i.e., to engage in repetitive thoughts they struggled to control). That rumination was associated with worse mood the next day.
These findings fit with a broader pattern in sleep research. Studies consistently show that poor sleep increases negative emotions and reduces positive ones. At the same time, emotional distress can make it harder to sleep, creating a cycle where sleep disruption and emotional disturbance reinforce one another. Protecting your sleep helps interrupt that cycle and makes emotional balance easier to maintain.
Healthy sleep hygiene
You can learn to protect your sleep by building a few simple habits that help your body wind down and stay asleep.
Try to go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time each day so your internal clock stays regulated.
Create a short bedtime routine that signals it is time to wind down, such as reading or doing something calming.
Make your sleep environment work for you. A cool, dark, and quiet room reduces the chances that you will wake up during the night.
It also helps to limit screens before bed, avoid long daytime naps, and stay physically active during the day.
None of these strategies need to be perfect. The goal is simply to create conditions that make good sleep more likely.
Why this works
What I like about this habit is that it focuses on protecting a system your brain already relies on.
Sleep is one of the primary ways the brain resets its emotional circuitry. During sleep, your brain processes the day’s experiences, regulates stress hormones, and restores the balance between the emotional centers of the brain and the regions responsible for control. When sleep is disrupted, that balance gets thrown off.
That is why even small disruptions in sleep can make the next day feel harder. You are more likely to ruminate, more likely to feel irritable, and less able to step back from whatever is bothering you. In other words, the emotional system becomes easier to destabilize.
Protecting your sleep helps stabilize that system. It is a form of emotional maintenance. You are not waiting until you feel overwhelmed. You are creating the conditions that make emotional balance easier to maintain.
Dr. Ryan Martin is a psychologist, university dean, and author of three books - including the recent Emotion Hacks: 50 Ways to Feel Better Fast. Known online as the Anger Professor, he helps people understand how emotions work and what to do with them. His TED Talk, Why We Get Mad, has been watched more than 3.5 million times.
Boon, M.E., van Hooff, M.L.M., Vink, J.M. & Geurts, S.A.E. (2023). The effect of fragmented sleep on emotion regulation ability and usage. Cognition and Emotion, 37, 1132–43.