Sleep may not be a panacea for everything, but it does shape how we function each day. And according to an Arizona State University researcher, it helps us make more thoughtful, less impulsive decisions.
And it’s not just the quantity that makes a difference; it’s the quality of sleep.
“How rested do you feel when you wake up? How often were you up during the night? How easily did you fall asleep?” said Jack Waddell, assistant professor in ASU’s Department of Psychology and author of a new study related to sleep, impulsivity and drinking.
“Most people want to be healthy, and we do a lot to try to achieve it,” he said. “Yet amid all our wellness efforts, one crucial habit often gets overlooked: consistent, high-quality sleep.”
A lack of quality sleep can cloud thinking, drain energy, shorten patience and strain relationships. Waddell’s research found it may also affect how much someone drinks in a given night and their mental health.
Here, Waddell explains the connection between sleep, impulsivity, depression and alcohol use — just in time for National Sleep Month.
Note: Answers have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: What motivated you to study how sleep influences drinking behavior?
Answer: I became motivated to study sleep after hearing countless talks and reading countless papers on how sleep affects drinking behavior — and I promise I had a good night’s sleep before each one!
My research sits at the intersection of impulsivity and alcohol/cannabis use, and it quickly became clear that sleep was too central to this work to ignore. Our prior work had shown that sleep predicts riskier drinking behavior over time, which pushed me to zoom in and understand how these dynamics unfold day to day in people’s natural environments.
Q: When you talk about impulsivity, are you mainly referring to decision-making in the moment?
A: Impulsivity is a tricky concept and even academics can’t always agree on what it means. In my work, I think of it as “rash action” or a “lack of forethought,” when people act in the moment without fully thinking through the consequences. We often see this during highly emotional moments, for better or for worse. And this is especially important for understanding the problem of alcohol and cannabis use, because impulsivity shifts focus away from longer-term risks and toward what feels good in the moment.
Q: Can you walk me through how the study worked? How did you track sleep, impulsivity and drinking in real time through participants’ smartphones?
A: For three weeks, participants responded to prompts on their smartphones throughout the day. Each morning, they reported on their sleep from the night before: how long they slept, how often they woke up and how alert they felt that morning.
Later in the day and evening, they reported on drinking as it naturally occurred. Using brief, easy-to-complete assessments, we were able to capture drinking and impulsive behavior in real time, while people were drinking. That’s what makes this approach so powerful — we get a glimpse into people’s mood, feelings and impulsive actions as they’re happening, not days or weeks later. This method, called ecological momentary assessment, lets us study behavior in people’s natural environments, and it’s becoming increasingly accurate and reliable as the technology continues to improve.
Q: How does the quality of sleep impact our mental health?
A: Oh, it absolutely matters, probably more than most people realize! Sleep isn’t just about feeling rested — it plays a huge role in the same cognitive processes that shape mood, decision-making and emotional regulation. Interestingly, many of the mechanisms that link worse sleep to addictive behaviors are the very same ones that link it to depression. It underscores how sleep operates like a control center for mental health — when it’s off, it can impact nearly every aspect of how we think and feel. So while we often treat sleep as secondary, it’s actually one of the most powerful, cross-cutting factors influencing mental health.
Q: Based on your study, what were your findings?
A: We found two takeaways that I think are really exciting. First, getting more sleep and feeling more “ready” in the morning made people less impulsive when drinking, which meant they drank less and had fewer problems, like hangovers, drunk driving or regrettable situations. And in a lot of ways, this makes sense: When you’re alert and rested, your brain has more fuel, and you just don’t make the same rash choices as when you have a worse night of sleep.
But here’s the kicker: Even beyond impulsivity, simply feeling more “ready” in the morning predicted less risky drinking later that day.
My elevator pitch? If we can help people sleep better, which from my clinical experience is one of the easiest things to intervene upon, we could make a broad impact on risky drinking behavior.
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