The Rough Guide to Psychology An Introduction to Human Behaviour and the Mind (Rough Guides)

THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY

In 2009, for example, the British man Brian Thomas strangled his wife
to death in their holiday caravan. He was cleared of murder late in 2009
after psychologists for the defence and prosecution agreed that he had
been asleep and not in control of his own actions.
Another way that sleep goes wrong is when it remains stubbornly
elusive. Around 33 percent of Americans are said to suffer from insomnia

• either difficulty falling off to sleep or waking early without being able
  to return to slumber, or both. The condition can become self-perpetu-
  ating as sufferers grow increasingly anxious about their lack of sleep.
  In fact there’s evidence to suggest insomniacs get more sleep than they
  realize. In a 2004 study, Nicole Yang and Alison Harvey kitted out forty
  insomniac university students in Oxford with an actigraph – a watch-
  like gadget that records nocturnal tosses and turns. This allowed the
  researchers to compare how long the students had really taken to fall
  asleep with how long the students thought it had taken them. When the
  data was used to show the students that they were falling asleep quicker
  than they realized, their estimates on subsequent nights grew more accu-
  rate and they became less anxious about their sleep patterns.
  Tackling this sleep-related anxiety is particularly important because
  other research has shown the worry about not having enough sleep can
  be more debilitating than the lack of sleep itself. Christina Semler and
  Alison Harvey, also based at Oxford University, showed this by tricking
  insomniac students with false actigraph feedback into thinking they’d
  had less sleep than they really had. This caused the students to have more
  negative thoughts (for example, “I can’t cope today”), to feel more sleepy,
  to perform more sleep-related monitoring (noticing aching muscles
  and sore eyes), and to resort to more compensatory behaviours (such as
  taking a daytime nap). All this despite the fact that the actual quality of
  their sleep was the same on the days they were given false negative feed-
  back as it was on days that they were given positive feedback.