REAL LIFE NEWS: BEAUTY SLEEP REALLY IS SOMETHING YOU NEED
by Hazed
It turns out that beauty sleep really is a thing. Researchers have shown that people who miss out on their sleep are less attractive to others. Just a couple of nights where you go short on your sleep are enough to make you “significantly” less beautiful.
Effects such as black circles round the eyes and puffy eyelids affect others’ judgement of you, and can even put them off socialising with you.
The researchers asked 25 university students (a mix of male and female) to be the subjects of the experiment. First, they were asked to get a good night’s sleep for two consecutive weeks. A week later, they were told to go for two nights with just four hours sleep per night. They were given kits to measure their night-time movements; that checked how much they slept, to make sure they didn’t cheat.
After the good sleep and the bad sleep sessions, the researchers took make-up free photos of the participants.
Next, they showed those photos to 122 strangers and asked them to rate the subjects on attractiveness, health, sleepiness and trustworthiness. They also asked, “How much would you like to socialise with this person in the picture?”
The strangers could tell if the person in the picture was tired, and if the subject was sleepy, then the stranger downgraded their attractiveness score, judged them to be less healthy, and said they were less willing to socialise with them.
The researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, say that the result makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. “An unhealthy-looking face, whether due to sleep deprivation or otherwise, might activate disease-avoiding mechanisms in others.”
So it’s clear that if you want to be successful at the dating game, you need to get your beauty sleep!
