I want you to think about a time when you were really popular?

It may have been when you were in high school. It may have been when you won a competition. It may have been one of those ‘big’ birthdays.

For me, one week stands out.

It was 7 days when I was in the midst of a media frenzy. A study I published showed that sleep training did not harm babies - and it went like wildfire across the world. Starting with Skype interviews with American journalists from The New York Times to Reuters (to name a few) - to the end of the week where I was speaking live on BBC Radio.

This is a good demonstration of how busy it is to be popular.

Now …

It’s gonna be hard - but think of a time when you felt alone.

A time when you were by yourself. At night. Lacking connection with other people.

For me, it was when I was travelling alone over to the USA for a conference. I got 1 hr sleep on the 14-hour flight from Sydney to Dallas Fort Worth.

I knew several people at the conference, but the bad sleep on the plane + the jetlag caused a bunch of lonely nights by myself in my hotel room.

A neglected area of sleep research is the link between Popularity and Sleep.

And this is an area that Postdoctoral Researcher - Dr Serena Bauducco from Örebro University - and I have been exploring over the past few weeks.

Without letting the ‘cat out of the bag’ - (btw, is it common for people to put cats in bags?) - today’s blog is going to take you through our recent journey, and explore the complex relationship between Popularity and Sleep.

I’m Head Of The Class. I’m Popular.

Back when Nada Surf’s song ‘Popular’ was blasting through our boomboxes in 1996, you may have been playing the musical-chairs-game of trying to get connected and make friends.

Back then, very few people were using Netscape to dial-up and communicate with people over a new thing called the World Wide Web.

It was actually the humble telephone that was a popular way to communicate with others in the evening.

The telephone allowed you to talk for hours with another person - all for the low price of 20 cents.

Even further back, people used these things called ‘pens’ and would write on very thin pieces of trees called ‘paper’ and then do that 4-letter word called ‘mail’ to their Pen Pal.

Now?

Well - think about how you communicate in the evening.

Do you ring someone up and have a chat?

Or are you more inclined to type messages to a group of people - or even the entire world to see?

The point I’m trying to get at is - has the WWW connected us, or made us feel more lonely in the evening?

More to the point, does being popular produce good sleep - and does feeling lonely cause bad sleep?

Does Loneliness Create Bad Sleep?

Dr Serena Bauducco came up with this idea of exploring the link between popularity and sleep. She had data from hundreds of teenagers who were asked to nominate some friends. This meant some people were nominated a lot (Popular Teens) and some were barely nominated (Lonely Teens).

And because she is a sleep researcher, Serena had a lot of sleep measures - including how much teens slept - as well as insomnia.

She crunched the data and showed me the results.

It wasn’t a simple picture that the data painted. So we’ve been thrashing out what the story is behind the data?

And here’s a couple theories we generated when it comes to the Lonely Kids.

First, it sucks to be lonely. You can feel that nobody likes you - and therefore you’re not worth much. And these negative thoughts cycle around your head - and push sleep away. This is insomnia.

And by pushing sleep away - this means you fall asleep late, but still have to get up and go to school. So you end up not getting much sleep.

Furthermore, you have to face the prospect of feeling lonely at school despite being around so many people.

You’re also an observer of the popular kids, and think that their life must be amazing …

Does Being Popular Create Good Sleep?

Remember that time that you were popular?

Did your head hit the pillow, with a wide smile across your face at how good your life is? And before you could think “get more followers on Instagram” - you were asleep?

Or did you do that thing that people with insomnia do? Where their head hits the pillow and suddenly you remember you didn’t reply to that friend! Or you forgot your hourly check of Snapchat.

You see, popular people actually have a lot to pack into the day - and evening.

In this way, getting all of your popular chores done means you are pushing your bedtime later, falling asleep later, and thus getting less sleep than you need.

And what this example implies is that technology possibly amplifies the problem.

Whilst a single post to multiple people in your network is efficient - it may also attract the attention of the masses - and the masses start to message you. And that can mount up to a lot of messages.

What Is The State Of The Science?

Two studies is the short answer.

In one study of 2500+ teenagers, it was found that the more popular one was, the less sleep they obtained. However, this was only seen for popular girls - not popular boys. In contrast, lonely boys did experience sleep issues. But it wasn’t less sleep - it was insomnia (Li et al., 2019).

A more recent study somewhat flipped things on its head. Their interpretation was that sleep could potentially affect one’s friendships - which makes sense if you think about how crappy you feel during the day when you don’t get enough sleep. Do you really feel like smiling and carrying a conversation?

Their data showed that compared to teenagers who rarely experienced sleep problems, the teenagers who frequently had sleep problems had about half the amount of friendships (Palmer et al., 2021).

And we’re talking about reciprocal relationships - when you nominated a friend and they nominated you.

Conclusions?

All too often you will hear researchers say “We know that …”

This means there have been a lot of studies on a topic - enough to be reasonably confident that the data are telling us how life works.

Truth is, we don’t know enough about the links between Popularity and Sleep. For example:

• Does popularity affect sleep? Or does sleep affect popularity?

• Is the ‘sleep’ part more likely to be getting less sleep - or insomnia?

• How does evening technology use fit into this equation? Does it make things worse for the popular kids because they’ve got to respond to a large number of people? Do lonely kids use technology as a way to escape from their shitty life?

Well, this is a call to you if you are a sleep researcher.

With so much saturation of the scientific literature, which analyses the same ideas - why not do something different?

• Prof MG