How Lack of Sleep Hinders Our Social Skills
Better Sleep -> Better Relationships
When we think about the implications of not getting enough sleep, feeling groggy, struggling to concentrate, or increased moodiness likely come to mind. However, lack of sufficient sleep can actually hinder a much broader range of functions than simply making us feel low on energy or irritable. A growing body of research reveals that sleep plays a pivotal yet often overlooked role in our ability to navigate interpersonal relationships and effectively utilize emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) refers to the capacity to perceive, understand, manage and reason about emotions - both within oneself and in relating to others. Having a high degree of emotional intelligence involves skills like recognizing and differentiating between emotions, tapping into feelings to aid decision making, understanding emotional complexities and transitions, and successfully regulating moods. Strong EQ is consistently correlated with greater life satisfaction, more positive social interactions, and improved psychological well-being. Those with high emotional intelligence tend to be self-aware, empathetic, and able to effectively communicate and connect with others.
While emotional intelligence stems from a complex interplay between nature and nurture, research increasingly shows that sufficient quality sleep is critical for properly deploying these abilities. Even partial sleep deprivation can dramatically impair core aspects of EQ. A study found that subjects who were sleep deprived for 30 hours had reduced ability to decipher emotions compared to those who slept 8 hours.
Sleep loss amplifies emotional reactivity while hindering our ability to modulate feelings and maintain equilibrium. When sleep deprived, we experience visceral emotional responses that are difficult to rein in - potentially blowing situations out of proportion or lashing out over small stressors. In this regard, lack of sleep has been shown to increase amygdala reactivity to negative emotional stimuli, which is a key brain region involved in processing fearful and threat-related information.
Sleep also plays a crucial role in our ability to effectively perceive and integrate emotional memory over time. Emotional memory refers to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of events and stimuli that evoke an emotional response. One study found that sleep deprivation significantly impaired participants' recall of emotion-laden events. Adequate sleep seems to facilitate the consolidation of these emotional memory traces, allowing us to better retain and associate emotional cues that guide our interpersonal interactions. Without sufficient sleep, we lose the emotional salience attached to memories of facial expressions, vocal tones, and situational contexts - all of which feed into our emotional intelligence capacities. This deficit in emotional memory from sleep loss could potentially impair our ability to navigate complex social experiences.
Lack of sleep also dulls our capacity to accurately read facial expressions, vocal tones, and other nonverbal emotional cues. We become worse at discerning others' emotional states and social signals, hampering interpersonal communication. In one study, sleep deprived participants were significantly worse at recognizing facial expressions of anger and happiness compared to well-rested controls. Not only do we struggle to recognize how others feel without adequate rest, sleep debt actively inhibits our ability to resonate with others' emotional experiences. Empathy requires placing ourselves in another's context, which is impaired by sleep deprivation.
Overall, the emotional intelligence deficits induced by insufficient sleep make us more impatient, socially inept, and worse at connecting with others. This strains our abilities to effectively navigate relationships and social situations while compounding interpersonal stress.
Researchers have detected neural mechanisms potentially underlying this link between sleep and EQ. Brain imaging has revealed that sleep deprivation dampens connectivity between the amygdala (which processes emotions) and certain prefrontal regions controlling emotional regulation. Essentially, the neural pathways allowing higher order thinking to temper emotional reactivity become decoupled without enough sleep.
In our fast-paced, overscheduled lives, we frequently sacrifice sleep for other demands. However, doing so comes at the cost of eroding crucial interpersonal skills and our facility to build meaningful connections with others. Making sleep a top priority enables our brains to recharge and perform optimally across emotional intelligence domains. Gaining control over our emotional landscapes and cultivating our capacities for empathy fundamentally rely on sufficient quality sleep each night.
While emotional intelligence is considered key to success in professional and personal lives, perfecting these abilities requires consistently prioritizing sleep as part of a healthy lifestyle. Sleep isn't just physical restoration - it's critical for emotional restoration and social adeptness as well.
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About the author
Alen Juginović is a medical doctor and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School studying the effect of poor sleep quality on health. He is public and keynote speaker and teacher at Harvard College. He and his team also organize international award-winning projects such as conferences which attracted 2400+ participants from 30+ countries, 10 Nobel laureates and major leaders in medicine (Plexus Conference), collaborative research projects, charity concerts and other events. He co-founded Med&X Association, a non-profit organization that organizes conferences with Nobel laureates and partners with leading universities and hospitals around the world to help accelerate the development of talented medical students and professionals. Feel free to contact Alen via LinkedIn for any inquiries.
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