Feeling like you slept poorly might take a heavier toll on new parents than actual sleep loss

A new study published in Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation suggests that depression and anxiety may play a growing role in sleep problems among new parents, particularly as their baby gets older.

Becoming a parent is often described as one of life’s most joyful experiences, but it can also be exhausting. Frequent night wakings, feeding schedules, and the stress of caring for a newborn can disrupt sleep for months. Previous research has long shown that poor sleep and mental health issues like depression and anxiety are linked, but most studies have focused solely on mothers and the early weeks after birth.

Researchers wanted to better understand how sleep and mental health influence each other over time and whether the same patterns apply to fathers. Led by Avel Horwitz and Liat Tikotzky of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, the research team followed 232 couples from late pregnancy through their baby’s first year.

Participants reported on their sleep and mental health during pregnancy (the third trimester) and again when their baby was 4, 8, and 12 months old. Sleep was measured in two distinct ways: objectively, using wearable devices (actigraphy) that tracked nighttime movement, and subjectively, through sleep diaries and the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) questionnaire.

The researchers also assessed symptoms of depression and anxiety using established questionnaires—the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Because the scores on these two mental health tests were so strongly linked, researchers combined them into a single “depressive-anxiety” score for their analyses.

The findings revealed a clear pattern: parents who felt they were sleeping poorly and reported more severe insomnia symptoms were significantly more likely to report higher levels of depression and anxiety. Interestingly, the objective sleep data from the wearable devices did not show this connection. This suggests that how parents perceive their sleep—and the distress it causes them—may be more closely tied to their mental health than the actual number of minutes they sleep.

Over time, the direction of this relationship appeared to shift. Rather than sleep problems simply leading to mental health issues, the study found that worsening depression and anxiety at 8 months after birth predicted poorer perceived sleep later on at 12 months for both parents. In fathers, the relationship was even more complex: poor sleep quality at 4 months predicted worse mental health at 8 months, which then fed back into poorer sleep at 12 months, creating a continuous, cyclical trap.

These findings are crucial because they challenge the common assumption that sleep deprivation is the sole driver of distress in new parents. Instead, they suggest that psychological struggles may actually worsen how parents experience their sleep, particularly later in the first year when infants typically begin sleeping more consistently.

However, the study does have limitations. Because it is observational, it cannot definitively prove cause and effect. Additionally, the study sample was quite homogenous; participants were predominantly middle- to upper-income Israeli families with healthy infants, and most had low (non-clinical) levels of depression and anxiety. As a result, these findings may not apply as well to families facing significant economic hardship or parents with severe psychiatric conditions.

The study, “Sleep and symptoms of depression and anxiety in mothers and fathers of infants: A longitudinal perspective,” was authored by Avel Horwitz, Yael Bar-Shachar, Dar Ran-Peled, Gal Meiri, and Liat Tikotzky.