Is Worry Over Your Relationship Keeping You Up at Night?

When you think about the factors that affect your sleep, concern over your partner’s loyalty to you may seem like the last possible reason you toss and turn. Most of what you read about getting a good night’s sleep focuses on maintaining healthy habits such as exercising in the morning, keeping nighttime stimulation to a minimum, and avoiding alcohol before going to bed. No one mentions anything about feeling that your partner cares for you and will stick with you through thick and thin. However, new research shows that, surprisingly, these very feelings can help or hinder your sleep.

Sleep and the Quality of Your Relationship

According to a new study by Carnegie Mellon University’s Yuxi Xie and colleagues (2024), although sleep promotes health, while sleeping you are also potentially “vulnerable to harm and loss.” When things are going well with your relationship partner, you’ll be less likely to experience these feelings of weakness. Clearly, getting into arguments with your partner or having a partner whose own sleep habits are bad can be detrimental to your sleep. But, over the long term, Xie et al. believe that worries about the foundation of your relationship are the real culprit.

One of the key emotional factors that can underlie worries about your relationship, the CMU team propose, is attachment anxiety. Arising from the framework of adult attachment style theory, this type of anxiety occurs when individuals seek closeness with their partners but maintain a fundamental belief that they will be left or abandoned by those who are closest to them. Their “hypervigilance for threat” could increase their arousal and make it difficult for the anxiously attached to relax and let sleep take over.

There is another way that attachment style can interfere with sleep for people in a long-term relationship, and that is when an individual is high on fearful avoidance. Individuals with this attachment style, as the term implies, resist closeness with their partners, even though they may be in a committed relationship. Their anxiety stems from a fear of abandonment, and so they “often deny needs for relational security.” During the day, they suppress their negative emotions, but at night their “suppressed emotions might reemerge,” which would then disrupt their sleep.

Testing the Attachment Style-Sleep Connection

Using two separate samples of adults in married or committed relationships, the CMU authors tested the relationship between attachment style and sleep quality. The first sample contained 113 couples averaging 40 years of age, and the second had 271 married couples averaging 70 years old.

All participants completed measures of attachment style with items such as “I worry about being abandoned” (anxiety) and “I prefer not to show people how I feel deep down” (avoidance). A 10-item measure of “Home Base Security” included ratings of statements such as “My spouse is always there for me whenever I need him/her.”

An extensive questionnaire assessed the sleep quality of participants, including items that tapped into sleep satisfaction, latency, duration, efficiency, medication use, and daytime alertness/sleepiness. Both partners completed all measures, allowing the research team to examine individual effects as they interacted with partner effects. Additionally, the research team included a measure of negative affect tapping into anxiety, or “feelings of nervousness,” and depression, or “feeling blue.”

Xie et al. tested a statistical model that allowed them to infer the extent to which partners individually and jointly contributed to each other’s sleep quality via the pathway of attachment security and negative affect. The findings supported one component of the model across both samples, and that was the negative effect on sleep quality of high attachment avoidance (controlling for attachment anxiety). However, the older sample’s analyses did not support the predictive effect of attachment anxiety on sleep quality, in part because people in the older adult sample scored lower on the attachment anxiety measure in general. As the authors suggested, “This may be because, as relationships progress into older adulthood, there is less of the fear of abandonment that underlies attachment anxiety.”

Having a partner high in attachment avoidance, for both age groups, paradoxically predicted better sleep. Although it's not ideal to have a partner high in this quality from a relationship standpoint, one advantage might be that they don't share their feelings with you, protecting you from agonizing about their negative emotions.

Sleep Essential Reads

Beyond Snoring: Unveiling the Hidden Epidemic of Sleep Apnea

Trouble Sleeping in Warmer Weather? You're Not Alone

Getting Your Own Best Night’s Sleep

If you’re someone with chronic sleep problems, the Xie et al. study provides some insights into where you might look for relief. Rather than turn to sleep medications, either prescription or over-the-counter, take a look instead at the way you and your partner might answer some of the attachment-style questions. What might you be missing that could help both of you feel better able to share your bed without anxiety?

To sum up, of the many factors that can impact sleep quality, the emotional connections between partners may not rise to the top of most people’s lists. By attending to these fundamental characteristics of your relationship, you may be able to find the benefits of a good night's sleep to your health and that of your partner.