People With Chronic Pain May Want To Pay Closer Attention To This Sleep Habit
If you live with chronic pain, a restless night can mean waking up with even more discomfort. How long you sleep is only one piece of the picture, though.
A new study tracked brain activity overnight in adults with chronic pain to look at what happens within that sleep.
Researchers wanted to understand whether spending more time in certain sleep stages, particularly deep sleep, was linked to changes in next-day pain.
About the study
Most research on sleep and chronic pain relies on sleep diaries or wearable trackers. These can estimate sleep duration and restlessness, but they can't measure brain activity during the night.
To get a closer look, researchers in Denmark studied 19 adults with chronic pain, including fibromyalgia, chronic widespread pain, and low back pain.
Each person wore an at-home ear-EEG device (a small monitor that records brain activity through electrodes in the ear) overnight for several weeks and rated their pain each morning.
The goal was to see whether changes in sleep from one night to the next were linked to next-day pain.
More stable deep sleep was linked to less pain the next morning
The researchers focused on deep sleep, also called N3 sleep, which is considered a restorative sleep stage. Previous research also suggests it helps regulate how the body processes pain.
On nights when people got more deep sleep, particularly longer, uninterrupted stretches, they tended to report less pain the following morning.
More fragmented deep sleep was associated with higher next-day pain. Spending a greater proportion of the night in light sleep was also linked to worse pain.
The researchers compared each person's nights against their own typical patterns rather than against other people.
That means the link reflected night-to-night shifts, with a better night of deep sleep tending to come before a less painful morning.
Why deep sleep may play a role in pain sensitivity
Deep sleep helps regulate the nervous system's response to pain, including the body's natural ability to turn down pain signals.
Research has found that deliberately disrupting this sleep stage can increase pain sensitivity.
This may explain why uninterrupted deep sleep was particularly important in the study. Getting some deep sleep isn't necessarily the same as getting enough continuous deep sleep.
There's also a potential feedback loop. Pain disrupts sleep, while disturbed sleep may increase inflammation and make the body more sensitive to pain. That can make another restless night more likely.
Since the researchers observed sleep rather than changing it, the findings can't show that disrupted deep sleep causes worse pain. However, it adds to the evidence that sleep quality deserves attention alongside sleep duration when managing chronic pain.
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How to support better sleep when you're living with chronic pain
If pain is regularly interrupting your sleep, a few steps may help you address both concerns:
- Ask about CBT-I: The researchers named cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) as one approach that reduces fragmented sleep, which they noted may have benefits for pain management.
- Talk to your health care provider: Discuss your pain and sleep difficulties together. They can help identify potential causes of disrupted sleep and recommend appropriate treatments.
- Don't ignore persistent sleep problems: Frequent waking or unrefreshing sleep still counts as a sleep problem when you're spending enough hours in bed, so mention it too.
The takeaway
For people with chronic pain, how steady your deep sleep is may matter as much as how long you sleep. In this study, longer, less interrupted stretches of deep sleep came before less painful mornings.
If your nights are often broken up, ask your provider about ways to work on sleep continuity, like CBT-I, rather than just adding more hours in bed.
