Are Nice People More Susceptible to Insomnia than Callous People?

Are nice people more susceptible to insomnia? Recent research may have implications for this question, which until recently was rarely previously asked.

Callous? Unemotional? Chances are you won’t be losing any sleep over it
That’s an article by Alice M Gregory (Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, Dan Denis (Harvard University ) and Essi Viding (CL).

But please note: the original paper reported fairly small correlations. Moreover, one can’t conclude that people without insomnia are not nice people!

According to the theory I am developing, perturbance (a form of emotion) is a core mechanism underlying much insomnia. Why? Because the brain’s sleep-onset control system likely treats a motivator’s high insistence as an indication that it is important to stay awake. In manifest perturbance, one attends to one or more insistent motivators (concerns), i.e., executive processes are engaged with insistent motivators. This engagement maintains the activation (the insistence) of the motivator, causing a positive feedback loop.

The cognitive shuffle is meant to interfere with perturbance in multiple ways.

So, a line of future research would be to investigate whether perturbance mediates some of the effects reported in the study mentioned above.