Friday, February 3, 2017

Sleeping Your Way to a Loving Marriage


The way that spouses evaluate their relationship is critically important for their individual and conjoint well-being.  Most of us have heard about the concept “cognitive dissonance,” meaning a discrepancy between one’s standard belief and her behavior.  For instance, if a wife believes that she loves her husband, but frequently launches into tirades against him, she must resolve the obvious discontinuity between her belief and her overt behavior.  Cognitive dissonance has a counterpart, “cognitive consonance,”  meaning behavior that is consistent with belief.  For instance, the wife of our example would express cognitive consonance by acknowledging the reality of her frequent tirades and deciding that she must not love her husband as much as she thinks she does.

A spouse's rating of her/his marriage influences the quality of the marriage.  Accordingly, a consistently positive marital relationship rating facilitates marital contentment via cognitive consonance.  Understandably then, psychologists seek to understand and encourage whatever promotes positive ratings.

Heather M. Maranges and James K. McNulty (2017) looked at the affect of self-regulation on marital relationship rating, meaning how an individual’s personal emotion management influences the way they evaluate their marriage.  More specifically, the psychologists chose to limit their investigation to how sleep, as a means of self-regulation, contributes to marital satisfaction.  They wondered if a spouse would rate their partner less highly when the rating spouse was sleep deprived, and more highly when the rating spouse was sleep satisfied.

The study recruited 68 newly wed couples, defined as a couple married less than 6 months.  They averaged 24 years-of-age and 14 couples had children.  The investigators required each member of the couple for seven days to keep diaries independently to record their daily experiences, the number of hours slept per night, and their overall daily marital satisfaction.

As expected, marital satisfaction was higher on good sleep days.  And about 33 percent of the subjects indicated that they were aware that poor sleep caused marital discontent. Similarly, stress was higher when sleep was impaired.  In general, women were less compromised during days after poor sleep than were men.  Maranges and McNulty speculated that the women might have been inherently better stress regulators.

Nothing especially startling about these results.  However, they do underscore the interrelationships among lifestyle, the body, human interaction, and life satisfaction.  My point is to encourage you to think about all four of the interacting dimensions not just regarding sleep, but for all areas of your physical and mental health.  Whenever you are stressed or your energy is otherwise depleted, your are less capable in body and mind, and less appealing as an interpersonal partner.


Reference:

Maranges, Heather M. and  McNulty, James K. (2016).  Journal of Family Psychology, July.  No Pagination Specified.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/fam0000225


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