How sleep deprivation may be making you unpopular and lonely

• Sleep loss can badly impact your social life, a team at University of California at Berkeley found.
• It can lead to antisocial and reclusive behavior but it can also affect how others treat you.
• If you’re sleep-deprived, it may also cause others around you to shy away from you too.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Whether it’s crying babies, loud neighbors, or simply endless thoughts running through your head, sometimes you just can’t fall asleep.

Regardless of how hard you try, the consequences the following day are always unforgiving: crippling fatigue, poor concentration, and – above all – struggling to think of anything other than your bed.

However, as researchers from the University of California at Berkeley found, sleep deprivation can have serious social consequences, and they aren’t just limited to how you perform at work or throughout the day.

It isn’t just your health that suffers from night-time restlessness; you can end up completely sabotaging your social life too.

Sleeping too little leads to reclusive behavior

Led by postdoctoral fellow at the Walker’s Center for Human Sleep Science Eti Ben-Simon, the team found that a lack of sleep can lead to unsociable and reclusive behavior – and that it can have the same effect on the people around you.

According to the researchers’ findings, published in Nature Communications, people who sleep badly more often are lonelier as a result.

While it’s already a well-known fact that social isolation can cause sleep disorders, it hasn’t been clear whether a lack of sleep could also lead to people feeling lonely.

The less you sleep, the more physical distance you need from others

To conduct their study, the scientists performed an experiment in which one group of subjects didn’t sleep for a night, while another group was allowed to sleep in.

Both groups received a video the following day in which they were faced with people approaching them, where they had to gauge how close was “too close”.

The results were pretty clear: those who hadn’t slept felt their space was invaded between 18% to 60% faster than those of the group who had.

This led participants to create more of a social distance between themselves and others if they missed sleep on a given night, according to the researchers.

Too little sleep leads to unsociable tendencies

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to prove that the results weren’t accidental.

While the “near space” networks in the brains of well-rested participants didn’t show any abnormalities, those of the other group were “braced” and on alert for potential threats.

Not only that, but the “theory-of-mind” network, an area of the brain responsible for empathy and sociability, was less pronounced in those with sleep deprivation.

Interestingly, the results showed that those who were suffering from sleep deprivation didn’t just have issues with shying away from those around them.

Another experiment, in which researchers used videos to evaluate people who had slept well and those who hadn’t, showed that those who hadn’t were perceived by viewers as worse in terms of their potential for cooperation and sympathy.

Your own lack of sleep can have a knock-on effect on those around you

“The less sleep you get, the less you want to socially interact,” said Matthew Walker of the University of California.

“In turn, other people perceive you as more socially ‘repulsive’, further increasing the grave social-isolation impact of sleep loss,” he continued, saying: “Sleep deprivation can turn us into social lepers.”

Worse still, those who have to deal with people suffering from a lack of sleep – or even, in the case of this study, those who watched videos of them – also end up being “infected”, leading to an almost viral transmission of the feeling of social isolation wherever there’s a lack of sleep.

“It’s perhaps no coincidence that the past few decades have seen a marked increase in loneliness and an equally dramatic decrease in sleep duration,” said Ben-Simon.

“On a positive note, just one night of good sleep makes you feel more outgoing and socially confident, and furthermore, will attract others to you,” said Walker.