Eus van Someren

Speakers

Eus van Someren
Roxanne Bongers
Sven Leach

Abstract

“Sleep on it” when upset is common advice to help overcome distress. Previous studies of the Sleep and Cognition group showed failing overnight distress regulation in people with insomnia. Since many people with anxiety- or stress-related disorders experience insomnia, it is conceivable that their poor sleep quality contributes to perpetuating their emotional distress. This symposium gives an overview or one of our approaches to address this question.

Our Netherlands Sleep Registry and collaboration with 18 mental health care providers made it possible to recruit 619 people with anxiety- or stress-related disorders. Their subjective sleep and overnight change in emotional distress were assessed up to 21 nights across 8 months. Up to 12 of these nights included headband sleep-EEG recording as well. Half of the participants received sleep treatment provided online through the Netherlands Sleep Registry.

While the study is still ongoing, we can show first results support worse distress regulation across nights of poor sleep quality, and improvement of overnight distress regulation after sleep treatment. We also discuss challenges of preprocessing and analysing thousands of nights of home-recorded sleep-EEG to find the nocturnal brain activity correlates of overnight distress regulation.