The Insulating Function of Sleep for Well-being: Daily Sleep Quality Attenuates the Link Between Current Affect and Global Life Satisfaction

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people’s global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regulatory role of sleep: insulating people’s global life satisfaction from the affective highs and lows of daily life. We tested this hypothesis in two daily diary samples (N ₁ = 3,011 daily diary observations of 274 participants and N ₂ = 12,740 daily diary observations of 811 participants). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, following nights of reported high-quality sleep, the link between current affect and global life satisfaction was attenuated (i.e., lower affect globalizing). Sleep-based interventions are broadly useful for improving psychological health and the current findings suggest another avenue by which such interventions may improve well-being: by providing crucial protection against the risks associated with affect globalizing.