By now, you’ve probably heard that you should be logging seven to nine hours of sleep to feel and perform at your best. Getting enough sleep is important for everything from memory to immunity, and it’s also crucial for heart health and overall longevity.
Even if you’re hitting the minimum, however, you still may not be getting enough sleep to provide the additional emotional boost that allows you to feel your best — a state of well-being known as flourishing.
What it means to flourish
The concept of flourishing encompasses a number of aspects of life satisfaction, including having a sense of purpose, feeling engaged in your daily life and relationships with others, and being optimistic about your future.
“Flourishing is kind of a combination of how happy you feel and how well you’re doing generally in life and overall functioning,” explains Michael Scullin, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University and head of the Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory there.
Focus on getting your own personal optimal amount of sleep
When it comes to achieving this state of optimal functioning, sleep is one of the key building blocks.
Attaining the minimum recommended amount of seven nightly hours is an essential starting point: It’s one that more than a third of U.S. adults still aren’t regularly meeting, according to the latest sleep data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But simply reaching the bottom threshold may not be enough. There’s a difference between getting adequate sleep — enough to be able to go about your day — and getting enough so that you truly feel rested and replenished.
The average adult is “mildly sleep-restricted,” Scullin says. “They may be bouncing around that bottom-level threshold of what’s been recommended of ‘don’t go below seven hours,’ but maybe they need closer to eight.”
If you fall into this category, improving your sleep can provide a boost and help enhance your overall sense of flourishing.
How sleep helps you flourish
Recent research by Scullin and others shows that being well-rested plays a key role in the ability to flourish in a number of areas.
Relationships with others
To start, being well-rested helps increase the quality of interactions with others, including within the context of existing relationships. In one study of newlyweds, spouses were more likely to report higher levels of marital satisfaction after nights when they’d gotten more sleep.
The converse has also been found to be true: Those who reported worse sleep quality over the previous month gave lower ratings for the quality of their romantic relationships.
Getting enough sleep helps set the stage for more positive interactions by helping you replenish emotionally, but it may also enhance your ability to pick up on cues you might not notice otherwise, such as your partner’s smile, says Nancy Sin, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Sleeping well also provides a buffer against loneliness by influencing interactions with others. Not only are you more likely to want to interact with others when you’re well-rested, but studies show that being sleep-deprived lessens the likelihood of interactions and actually functions as a social repellant.
Receptiveness to positive experiences
A new study by Sin and her co-authors found that participants who rated their sleep quality higher than usual were more likely to expect to have a good day overall. They were also more likely to anticipate a variety of positive events the following day, ranging from social interactions to spending time in nature.
“Anticipation of a positive experience is something that I think can be a really important part of flourishing,” says Sin.
Being attuned to positive experiences is in keeping with a concept known as anticipatory pleasure. It can also prime you for additional positive experiences and increase the joy you experience from a given event. “When you notice things, or you anticipate an otherwise neutral situation as being more pleasant or more positive, it might lead to more of an upward spiral of positive experiences,” she says. In the case of noticing a partner’s smile, for example, this can prime you to anticipate positive interactions.
New research even shows that the ability to be enriched by experiences such as viewing art is enhanced by a good night’s sleep. As noted in an abstract published earlier this year, Scullin and his co-authors had participants view and rate various paintings following two full nights of sleep and two nights of just five and a half hours’ sleep. When sleep-deprived, participants didn’t just give lower marks for how much they liked the paintings; they also gave lower ratings of beauty for the artworks themselves.
Ability to handle stress
Sin explains, “How we deal with challenges is a really important part of flourishing.”
That’s because sleep doesn’t just prime you for positive events; it also helps you anticipate and respond to stress.
Being well-rested improves your ability to cope with stressors and to reset emotionally afterward. There’s another key aspect: Just as you’re more likely to anticipate having a good day after you’ve had a good night’s sleep, research shows that you’re less likely to expect stressful events — everything from arguments to experiencing discrimination — to occur.
But after a night of poor sleep, it’s the opposite: As Sin’s study found, participants who said they’d slept worse than normal were more likely to expect a stressful day ahead.
“Stress anticipation is a really important part of the stress process that can get overlooked,” Sin explains. In fact, these expectations alone can affect your outlook for the day, she notes, regardless of whether the anticipated stressful events actually occur.
Motivation to engage in activities
The better you sleep, the more likely you are to take actions that bolster your well-being.
To start, you’re more likely to have the energy and motivation for exercise, a proven mood-booster. Studies show you’re likely to make healthier diet choices when you’ve gotten enough sleep, consuming fewer high-fat and high-sugar foods, affecting overall energy levels.
Being well-rested also affects how generous you feel. In a set of related recent studies, sleep-deprived participants were less likely to express a desire to help others and less likely to donate as much money to charitable causes. Among the findings: After a night of poor-quality sleep, participants said they’d be less likely to offer to help others — regardless of whether it was a stranger or someone they knew — with tasks such as helping them with their grocery bags.
The researchers also looked at whether just one hour of lost sleep affected charitable giving — in this case, by tracking the number of donations made in the week after daylight saving time. Researchers found that donations in the immediate timeframe following the clock change were 10% lower than donations made at other times.
This decreased generosity has an obvious impact on others, but it also affects well-being, given that acts of kindness contribute to happiness and fulfillment.
In one experiment, for example, participants were given money and instructed to spend it on others or on themselves. Those who spent it on others reported higher levels of happiness.
The same is true when donating time rather than money: Spending time volunteering has been found to confer far-ranging benefits, including boosting mood and a sense of life purpose.
Increased sense of gratitude
When you increase your sleep, you also increase your ability to experience gratitude, which is linked to greater overall health and well-being, including life satisfaction and happiness levels.
In a new study, Scullin and his colleagues found that just five nights of longer sleep led to a marked improvement in overall gratitude. One way this was tracked was by asking participants to make lists of everything they were grateful for. After getting about 45 minutes more sleep than usual for five nights (to simulate a workweek), participants wrote twice as many items on their gratitude lists. The increase was in comparison to a second group that was somewhat sleep-deprived (with an average of 37 minutes less sleep than normal), as well as a control group of participants who’d gotten their usual amount of sleep.
The researchers tracked changes from day one through day five. “We asked them about feelings of flourishing, hopefulness, forgiveness, and general life satisfaction,” Scullin says. For those who were getting less sleep over the course of the week, all these measures got worse, but for those who were increasing their sleep, “all of these measures improved — their life was getting better.”
As he sums up, “It’s not only that losing out on sleep makes life worse; adding more sleep can make life better.”
Steps to take to improve your sleep
If you’re ready to harness the benefits of better sleep, here are some ways to get started.
Sleep hygiene: Sleep-promoting best practices include keeping your bedroom cool, masking or eliminating noise, and blocking light.
Consistency: Focus on getting enough sleep but also on keeping a regular schedule, which helps reduce everything from social jet lag to the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Winding down: Take steps to transition to bedtime, including limiting tech use and substituting a calming pre-bed routine.
Be intentional: Staying focused on why you want to improve your sleep can be a powerful part of winding down. “Try to set aside a few minutes when you’re preparing to go to bed to be intentional in thinking about what you want to get out of this good sleep,” says Sin. “You’ve got these important things in your life that you really value, and you want to be the best version of yourself for them.”
