Is your perception of sleep quality why you’re really tired?

A UCLA study has built on research suggesting that our belief of how well we sleep has a greater impact on cognitive performance, tiredness, and general mood than how many hours we actually get.

If there’s one thing this generation loves martyring itself over, it’s how ‘exhausted’ we are and how little we sleep.

We’ll go to bed at gone 2am, set an alarm for 7:30am, and wake up ready to fully embrace the narrative that the day is a write off. After a changeable stint on public transport, we arrive at work ready to overindulge in caffeine and describe how ‘foggy’ we are to colleagues who never asked.

What if someone told you, however, that the exhaustion and irritability you’re feeling is not a biological dose of karma for being a rubbish adult, but potentially a psychological error we unknowingly feed into? Can we absolve ourselves of responsibility? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Well, a recent UCLA study might just do us a favour. In one 13-week experiment, Samir Akre, a clinical sleep psychology researcher, monitored 249 people who were diagnosed with depression. He found that people performed better cognitively and reported being in a far better mood when told they had slept well – the catch being, they hadn’t.

In-fact, participants who had slept the golden standard of eight hours performed worse (and generally felt worse) than those who had slept five, seemingly because they were told the opposite was true about their night’s sleep. Brain activity was greater, reaction times were snappier, and people said they felt better on the five hours, purely because of their perception.

For a society who catastrophises anything other than an uninterrupted eight hours in dreamland, the notion that we can live happily without it is quietly radical. Just say the words ‘creepypasta’ and ‘Russian Sleep Experiment’ to an older Gen Zer, and they’ll recount fictional details of how prolonged sleep deprivation turned prisoners into goblins in the 1940s.

While that is certified bollocks, we’re not saying sleep is unimportant. Chronic sleep deprivation has strong links to increased risk of heart issues, diabetes, and cognitive decline.