Open Access<p>Healthy Sleepers Can Worsen Their Sleep by Wanting to Do so: The Effects of Intention on Objective and Subjective Sleep Parameters</p>
Author(s) -
Selina Ladina Combertaldi,
Björn Rasch
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
nature and science of sleep
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.715
H-Index - 34
ISSN - 1179-1608
DOI - 10.2147/nss.s270376
Subject(s) - sleep (system call) , polysomnography , medicine , sleep onset latency , affect (linguistics) , audiology , sleep debt , non rapid eye movement sleep , sleep onset , insomnia , psychology , sleep disorder , psychiatry , electroencephalography , communication , computer science , operating system
Sleep is regulated by homeostatic and circadian factors. In addition, psychological factors have a strong modulatory impact on our sleep, but the exact underlying mechanisms are still largely unknown. Here, we examined the role of intentions on subjective and objective sleep parameters. Young healthy sleepers were instructed to voluntarily either worsen or improve their sleep. We predicted that participants would be capable of worsening, but not improving, their sleep compared to a regular sleep condition. In addition, we predicted that the instruction to alter sleep would lead to a higher discrepancy between subjective and objective sleep variables.