Sleep Better If You Want to Be More Attractive.
Last night I sat until midnight and watched the old episodes of The Office. Now I regret this decision, not because I thought Dwight shouldn’t have hit Jim withall those snowballs , but because my tired donkey face literally makes other people look queasy, according to a May report by the Royal Society of Open Science. … It’s good that I hate talking to people.
The study , sponsored by Tina Sundelin, Mats Lekander, Kimmo Sorjonen, and John Axelsson, sought to find out if people were less likely to associate with sleep deprived people and whether sleep deprivation affects other qualities such as attractiveness or reliability. If you’ve ever missed a night, you know how it feels to try to keep up a conversation with someone, hoping they won’t notice how dead you are inside. Turns out you’re not doing yourself any favors.
This study shows that sleep restriction negatively affects the appearance of the face and reduces the willingness of others to interact with a sleep restricted person. It also complements previous studies of facial appearance after sleep deprivation, showing that despite using a different scale and a less significant and more natural state of sleep deprivation, the relationship between sleep, attractiveness, and a healthy appearance still persists.
The research team took 25 participants and photographed them after a normal night’s rest and after a two-day sleep restriction. The photographs were then rated by 122 participants in terms of the likelihood of interacting with these 25 people. In addition, sleep-deprived participants were assessed based on their health, attractiveness, sleepiness, and reliability.
What’s worse than looking ugly when you’re just sleepy ? When you just want to sleep, you are considered a health hazard in general. People also tend to reinforce their avoidance behavior (i.e. people unwilling to talk to your tired behind) with sleep deprived people.
The results show that evaluators were less likely to interact with people who were sleep deprived. In addition, when sleep was restricted, participants were perceived as less attractive, less healthy, and more sleepy.
However, there is good news for you wonderful insomniacs . If you are attractive enough, you will still look good even if you have missed a few hours of sleep.
Evaluators were much more likely to associate with someone they found attractive than with someone unattractive, and attractive people appeared significantly healthier. Interestingly, the results also showed that between someone who looked very sleepy and someone who looked extremely wary, the change in others’ ratings of both health and attractiveness increased by about a step and a half on a seven-point scale.
If you don’t get enough sleep, especially on a daily basis, it may be easier to fix the problem than you think.
Recording your sleep and wake times, staying on the same sleep schedule, and collecting quantifiable data (usually from a fitness tracker or sleep tracking app) can definitely help stimulate desired habits and make specific, long-term changes. You can add sleeping pills such as melatonin to your nighttime ritual if you feel out of sync. However, don’t assume that your tracker is the final word in how you sleep . Moving a little while you sleep is normal, so light and deep sleep markers are not the most accurate way to measure the quality of your rest.