Compassionate people have fewer sleep problems and are more likely to get a good night’s rest, a study suggests.
Researchers in Finland examined the relationship between compassion and sleep quality in more than 1,000 young adults over an 11-year period.
The participants underwent compassion assessments at the beginning and end of the study period. They had their sleep patterns evaluated three times to check for disturbances and examine their sleep quality.
The team found that having high compassion led to better quality sleep and experiencing fewer disturbances like insomnia.
Though compassionate people are often prone to staying up late and losing sleep as they worry about not calling home or accidentally saying something rude, the findings suggest that those with a clean conscience may sleep better.
The researchers wrote: ‘There is an increasing need for novel interventions to reduce sleep difficulties. Our findings provide the first pieces of evidence that compassion for others could buffer against sleep difficulties.’ The researchers used data from the Young Finns Study, a 37-year Finnish study that started in 1980. That research started with 3,596 Finns between ages three and 18, who were born between 1962 and 1977.
For the new study, the team focused on participants who underwent compassion assessments in 2001 and 2012 and had their sleep patterns evaluated in 2001, 2007, and 2012. The 1,056 participants took the Temperament and Character Inventory, a questionnaire developed by psychiatrist and geneticist C Robert Cloninger that looks at habits and temperaments to determine personality type.
They were also evaluated on the Jenkins Sleep Scale and the Maastricht Vital Exhaustion Questionnaire, which assess the severity of sleep issues.
The team found that participants who had higher compassion levels had better sleep quality and fewer disturbances. However, there was no association with sleep duration.
Additionally, depression dampened any positive effects that compassionate individuals experienced, ‘possibly implying that depressive symptoms mediate the pathway from high compassion to fewer sleep issues.’
-Daily Mail.uk‘
