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Your Sleep Issues May Reveal Something About Your Relationship

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A healthy, happy relationship equals a better night’s sleep, according to a new study. (Photo: Trunk Archive)

It’s no secret that your relationship can have a big impact on your life, but new research has found it can seriously mess with an area you would have thought was off limits: your sleep.

According to the study, which was published in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science, people who don’t feel their partners are responsive — a measure of feeling well cared for, understood, or validated — are more likely to have issues sleeping than those who feel their partner meets those needs. For the study, researchers studied the sleep patterns of more than 200 people for a week and found that those who said they had a good relationship were less likely to report having sleep issues than those who said their relationship wasn’t great.

What’s the link? Researchers say that people who have responsive significant others have lower levels of anxiety and stress, which then makes it easier for them to get a good night’s sleep.

Board-certified sleep medicine doctor and neurologist W. Christopher Winter of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine tells Yahoo Style that he isn’t shocked by the findings. “Relationships are so impactful on so many areas of your life, and this is the person that you’re sleeping next to,” he says. “If that person is causing you stress, it makes sense that lying in close proximity to them wouldn’t help you relax enough to get a good night’s sleep.”

Unfortunately, Winter says it’s not uncommon for relationship stress to mess with a person’s ability to sleep. “When you look at people who have strong subjective complaints about their sleep, many if not all of those things tend to boil down to some sort of stress — from work, family, finances, or their relationships,” he says.

But it doesn’t end there: Even after those issues are resolved, they can still have a strong impact on a person’s sleep. “Over time, this creates stress about sleep,” Winter says. “As time passes, the initial stressor, like a person’s relationship, is replaced by stress about the ability to go to sleep.” And, once a person is stressed about going to sleep, it can be that much harder for them to actually do it, creating a vicious cycle.

Of course, it’s not always easy to pinpoint if your relationship is the reason why you’re not sleeping well. Winter says the best way to know is to go through the same checklist a sleep expert would if you’re not sleeping well. Namely, is your bedroom noisy? Is it hot or bright? Are you looking at screens right before bed? Does your partner snore? Are there pets in your bed?

“Those are the first things we address,” Winter says. “After that, we look at life stress.” If you don’t meet any of those criteria, maybe it’s time to take a closer look at your relationship — it might be affecting your sleep more than you’d think.

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