Just as many employees, 30-year-old Mercy has been working virtually from home since March 2020 when the initial cases of Covid-19 were reported in the country.
The flexibility accorded by this working arrangement encouraged Mercy to enrol for an online master’s degree in one of the universities offering the course in Nairobi.
“Our office is out of town. So, this prevented me from enrolling for the course earlier as I knew I would always be late for class. But since I am not commuting now, I decided to grab the opportunity and get it done,” she says.
Despite her commitment and dedication, juggling work demands and class assignments has proved to be an uphill task for Mercy.
“It’s hard work. For the past four months, I have been forced to sacrifice my sleep. I go to bed late, past midnight and wake up at four o’clock in the morning to study, before work begins at eight,” she notes.
In addition to changes in her sleep patterns, Mercy states that lately, she has also been battling stress and struggling to deal with negative thoughts that keep crowding her mind.
“I have never been a person who gets really affected by things around me or what I hear in the news. But now I keep thinking of all the people who are suffering and dying because of Covid-19. This keeps me awake at night with the fear that I or someone in my family may be next.”
Mercy is not alone. Most people, at some point in their life, tend to grapple with stressful situations and negative thoughts that can take a toll on their quality of life and well-being.
This may result from underlying physical, psychological or mental health problems.
Aside from the above factors, health experts note that sleep, which many people take for granted, also plays a significant role in the thought process of human beings.
It is recommended that people get at least eight hours of sleep each night. But not many people achieve this target.
Yet, a new study published recently in the Journal of Clinical Psychological Science indicates that a lack of sleep significantly impairs people’s ability to stop unwanted and unpleasant thoughts from entering their minds.
The study, which was conducted by researchers from the University of York, tested the ability of participants to suppress intrusive thoughts when they were either sleep deprived or well-rested.
Based on the results of the study, sleep-deprived participants suffered an increase in unwanted thoughts of nearly 50 per cent compared to those who had a good night’s sleep.
In life, the researchers note that certain things happening in people’s environment can remind them of painful or unpleasant experiences.
For instance, water flowing fast in a river might trigger a near-death drowning experience that someone went through in the past.
In the case of Mercy, the suffering and loss of lives linked to Covid-19 made her mind to relieve a painful moment in the past when she lost a loved one due to a long illness.
“It is clear that the ability to suppress unwanted thoughts varies dramatically between individuals. But until now, the factors that drive this variability have been mysterious. Our study suggests sleep loss has a considerable impact on our ability to keep unwanted thoughts out of our minds,” said Dr Marcus Harrington, the lead author of the study from the Department of Psychology at the University of York.
This could explain Mercy’s current inability to keep unwanted thoughts from her mind, even though the traumatic experience in her life happened many years ago.
“I moved on, and I have been okay for over 20 years so I couldn’t understand why those thoughts were coming back to me now, yet this isn’t the first time I am hearing or seeing people suffer or die from a disease,” she says.
Mercy sought care from a psychologist, who aside from helping her to come to terms with the challenge has advised Mercy to get sufficient sleep and reduce the stressors in her life.
“I am learning of better ways to manage my time, and balance my work and master’s degree course without putting so much pressure on myself,” states Mercy.
During the study, which was conducted in the US, 60 healthy participants learnt to associate faces with photographs of emotionally negative scenes such as an image from a war zone or neutral scenes such as an image of a cityscape.
The following morning, after a night of either sufficient sleep or total sleep deprivation, participants were shown the faces and asked to try to suppress thoughts related to the scenes with which they were paired.
sleep-deprived
Compared to the sufficient sleep group, the sleep-deprived participants had much more difficulty keeping unwanted thoughts of the emotionally negative and neutral scenes from their minds.
While the task became easier with the practice for the well-rested participants, negative thought intrusions remained consistently high for those who had gone without sleep. The researchers noted that the ability of the well-rested group to successfully suppress unwanted thoughts caused them to view the negative scenes more positively after the suppression task.
They also showed a reduced sweat response when the negative scenes were presented.
In contrast, the sleep deprivation group’s failure to keep unwanted thoughts out of mind meant that they did not experience this positive change in their responses.
“This study offers an important insight into the impact of sleep on mental health. Besides post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, our findings might have implications for our understanding of other disorders linked to sleep disturbances, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia,” said Dr Scott Cairney, a senior author of the study from the Department of Psychology at the University of York.
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