Does Improving Marital Quality Improve Sleep? Results From a Marital Therapy Trial

Abstract

For most adults, sleep is a dyadic behavior. Only recently have studies explored the dynamic association between sleep and relationship functioning among bed partners. The current study is the first to examine bidirectional associations between changes in insomnia and changes in marital quality over time, in the context of a marital therapy trial. Among husbands, improvements in marital satisfaction were associated with a 36% decreased risk of insomnia at follow-up. Regarding the reverse direction, counter-intuitively, wife baseline insomnia was associated with improvements in husbands’ marital satisfaction, but only among the non-treatment-seeking comparison group. Results are discussed in terms of implications for sleep and marital therapy, and suggest that improving sleep may be an added benefit of improving the marital relationship.

FUNDING

This work was supported by a grant given to JHL from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). JHL was supported by funding from the Family Studies Center at Brigham Young University, and the Mary Lou Fulton Young Scholar Award. WMT was supported by K23 HL093220.

Notes

¹ Number of children and age were entered as couple level variables because the correlations between partners approached 1 (see Table 2), which is problematic statistically. We elected to use wife report for both of these variables.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant given to JHL from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). JHL was supported by funding from the Family Studies Center at Brigham Young University, and the Mary Lou Fulton Young Scholar Award. WMT was supported by K23 HL093220.