Scientists find that watching cliff-hanging television can actually help with nodding-off. Photo / Getty Images
Scientists find that watching cliff-hanging television can actually help with nodding-off. Photo / Getty Images
The choice of evening television is crucial when relaxing after a long day, and it’s traditionally thought that horrors or thrillers should be avoided before bedtime if you want a nightmare-free sleep.
However, a new study has found that watching suspenseful thrillers, even if filled with cliffhangers, has little impact on sleep quality and can actually help with nodding off.
Scientists from the University of Fribourg recruited 50 young adults who watched three episodes of television before going to sleep in a specially designed laboratory.
Half the participants watched suspenseful shows on Netflix, such as How to Get Away with Murder, Orphan Black, Sense8 and The Sinner.
The other half, however, were given the documentary Islands of the Future where communities living off the coast of mainland Europe tackle energy issues.
Scientists tracked stress by monitoring heart rate and cortisol levels and also asking the volunteers how stressed they were feeling at various times.
Viola Davis stars in the TV show How To Get Away With Murder.
The findings revealed that while stress increased from watching suspenseful TV, the participants’ sleep quality remained unaffected, with neither total sleep time nor number of awakenings differing significantly between groups.
“In spite of the high pre-sleep arousal, participants fell asleep faster after watching the suspenseful compared with the neutral TV series,” the scientists write in their study, published in the journal Sleep Medicine.
Data show that people fell asleep after 19 minutes and 13 seconds if they were watching a thriller with a cliffhanger ending compared to 21 minutes and 20 seconds in the control.
For non-cliffhanger episodes the team found people fell asleep in 18 minutes and 51 seconds after a suspenseful show compared to 18 minutes and 39 seconds for the documentary.
Half the participants watched suspenseful shows on Netflix and the other half watched a documentary.
“Objective sleep parameters like sleep efficiency, total sleep time, wake after sleep onset and proportion of… REM sleep all remained unaffected by our experimental manipulation,” the scientists write.
“In fact, sleep onset latency (SOL) showed the opposite result pattern: participants fell asleep faster after watching three hours of a suspenseful TV series compared to watching three hours of a non-suspenseful control documentary.”
Data show that when cliffhangers were involved a person’s heart rate and cortisol levels spiked, a common indicator of stress.
Suspenseful shows may have been more interesting for participants
“Still, participants in the cliffhanger group as well fell asleep faster after watching the suspenseful TV series vs the non-suspenseful control documentary,” the scientists add.
“Thus, we have to conclude that arousal induced by suspenseful TV series with or without cliffhanger does not lead to impairments in neither objective nor subjective sleep quality in healthy young adults.”
Participants fell asleep faster after watching three hours of a suspenseful TV series. Photo / Getty Images
The team say that it is possible the suspenseful Netflix shows may have been more interesting to the participants whereas the documentary may have led to boredom and fostered feelings of frustration and anger, which are known to impair sleep.
“If the documentary was not interesting or exciting for the subjects, it might have elicited those negative affective states, which might have delayed sleep onset,” the team writes in the paper.
