You really DO sleep better with a clean conscience: Study reveals the personality type most likely to have the best quality snooze

Compassionate people have fewer sleep problems and are more likely to get a good night's sleep, a study suggests.

Researchers in Finland examined the relationship between compassion and sleep quality in more than 1,000 young adults over an 11-year period.

Participants underwent compassion assessments at the beginning and end of the study period. They had their sleep patterns evaluated three times to check for disruptions and examine their sleep quality.

The team found that high compassion led to better sleep quality and fewer disturbances such as insomnia.

Although compassionate people often tend to stay up late and lose sleep because they worry about not calling home or accidentally saying something rude, the findings suggest that people with a clear conscience can sleep better.

The researchers wrote: 'There is an increasing need for new interventions to reduce sleep problems. Our findings provide the first evidence that compassion for others can buffer against sleep problems.'

The researchers used data from the Young Finns Study, a 37-year Finnish study that began in 1980. That study started with 3,596 Finns between the ages of three and eighteen, born between 1962 and 1977.

For the new study, the team focused on participants who underwent compassion assessments in 2001 and 2012 and had their sleep patterns evaluated in 2001, 2007 and 2012.

The 1,056 participants completed the Temperament and Character Inventory, a questionnaire developed by psychiatrist and geneticist C. Robert Cloninger, which looks at habits and temperaments to determine personality type.

They were also evaluated on the Jenkins Sleep Scale and the Maastricht Vital Exhaustion Questionnaire, which assess the severity of sleep problems.

The team found that participants with higher compassion levels had better sleep quality and fewer disruptions. However, there was no correlation with sleep duration.

Furthermore, depression dampened any positive effects that compassionate individuals experienced, “possibly implying that depressive symptoms mediate the pathway from high compassion to fewer sleep problems.”

“Using a relatively large population-based sample, we found that high compassion was cross-sectionally associated with better sleep, including less perceived sleep deprivation and fewer sleep problems,” the study authors wrote.

'Compassion was not associated with sleep duration (i.e. the likelihood of being a short or long sleeper). High compassion also longitudinally predicted fewer sleep problems during the eleven-year follow-up.'

The findings are consistent with previous research showing that compassion could lead to better emotional regulation. Managing your emotions has been shown to improve sleep quality.

A 2019 study in the journal Nature Human behavior found that a lack of sleep can increase the risk of anxiety or worsen existing anxiety.

The researchers said these findings could provide non-medicinal solutions to a growing sleep crisis.

Nationally, data shows that about 34 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 64 are sleep deprived (less than seven hours per night).

This drops to 26 percent when adults are over 65, but that's still over a quarter of adults not getting enough sleep.

Men are generally more likely than women to not get enough sleep, with 33.3 percent reporting less than seven hours of sleep per night, compared to 32.1 percent of women.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says 8.4 percent of American adults take pills to fall asleep, more than double the amount they took a decade earlier.

These can rob the body of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Too little REM sleep can lead to forgetfulness and make it harder to get up in the morning.

Moreover, experts sounded the alarm last month when a study showed that almost a fifth of children take melatonin to sleep.

The researchers said a limitation of the study was that it relied on all self-reported data.

The research was published in the journal in August Brain and behavior.