Happy Sleep, Happy Couple?

INDIANAPOLIS -- Among bed-sharing, mixed-gender couples responding to an online questionnaire, sleep hygiene patterns were similar in some key areas but differed in others, with men having better sleep habits overall compared with women.

Women were more likely than their male partners to report going to bed stressed, angry, upset, or nervous. Women also were more likely to worry in bed, work before bed, and do things other than sleep in bed, like read or watch TV.

Josh Novak, PhD, of Auburn University in Alabama, presented findings from two companion studies of people in their 40s at the annual SLEEP meeting here, hosted jointly by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.

Novak told MedPage Today that while the couples who took part in the studies tended to understand their own and their partner's key sleep patterns, poorer sleep hygiene for couples was linked to worse sleep outcomes, more emotional distress, and higher overall conflict within the relationship.

Using a couples' sleep conflict assessment tool he developed, the studies suggested that sleep conflict between couples was associated with more general relationship conflict and poorer relationship satisfaction overall, Novak said. Partners who disagreed more about sleep routines and habits, the importance of sleep, sleep environment preferences, sleep and wake times, and the impact of sleep on their relationship tended to have poorer sleep hygiene and sleep quality, and were also more likely to report daytime sleepiness.

"In the U.S. and really across the world, most people share beds with their romantic partners, so it is surprising that couple sleep hygiene and conflict have not been studied all that much," Novak said. "I'm a morning lark and my partner is a night owl. I wanted to look beyond sleep chronotype and explore what other factors may impact couple sleep quality."

He noted that while the findings suggested that discordant partner sleep hygiene and higher sleep conflict may negatively affect overall conflict, the relationship may go the other way, with higher-conflict couples more likely to report more conflict related to sleep.

Novak said he has counseled sleeping in separate beds to patients whose sleep disorders are exacerbated by their partner's bedtime habits.

"That recommendation doesn't always go over so well," he noted. "Some patients are okay with it, but for others it is an emotionally-charged issue. It's not something they want to hear."

Sleep specialist Brian Cade, PhD, of Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Brighton, Massachusetts, agreed that more study is needed about how bedsharing couples' habits impact sleep quality and conflict within the relationship.

"I do think this is something that doesn't get enough attention within the sleep community," Cade, who was not involved with the research, told MedPage Today. "We could certainly do a better job of asking our patients with sleep issues about it. We talk a lot with our patients about modifiable aspects of sleep hygiene, but that may not include asking about the sleep patterns of partners."

The next step in the research, Novak said, is to look at the information longitudinally. Examining sleep hygiene "at the dyad level" has the potential to increase understanding of the shared experience of sleep and how the average of both partner's sleep hygiene is related to sleep outcomes and overall psychological and relationship health, he explained.

Novak said the findings in the current studies may not be generalizable due to the homogeneous sample of respondents, who were mostly non-Hispanic white couples with similar education levels and socioeconomic status. No single-sex couples were included in the studies, and people with sleep disorders were excluded. Other limitations included the cross-sectional design and the possibility of self-reporting bias.