Is Stress the Biggest Thing Stealing Your Sleep in 2026?

Yes, for a lot of people. In Resmed's 2026 Global Sleep Survey of 30,000 adults across 13 countries, stress or anxiety was the most common thing people said gets in the way of good sleep, named by 39% of respondents. Work came a distant second at 22%. And the arrow runs both ways: after a bad night, about a third of people said they felt more stressed the next day.

That loop, stress wrecking sleep and short sleep making stress worse, is backed by decades of lab work too. Here is what the new numbers show, what the research says about why it happens, and a few small, evidence-backed ways to break it. This is general information, not medical advice.

What did the 2026 survey actually find?

Resmed, a sleep and breathing device company, commissioned the survey. It was fielded by Cint between December 11, 2025 and January 14, 2026, with samples in each country matched to national age and gender mix. Singapore was one of the 13 markets, alongside the US, China, India, the UK, Japan, Brazil and others. Because it is a company-funded online survey, treat it as a snapshot of how people feel, not a measure of how long they actually sleep.

Key numbers from Resmed's 2026 Global Sleep Survey

| Finding | Share of respondents | | --- | --- | | Face barriers to getting quality sleep | 83% | | Name stress or anxiety as a top barrier | 39% (women 42%, men 36%) | | Get a good night's sleep four nights a week or fewer | 53% | | Feel more irritable after a poor night | 36% | | Feel more stressed after a poor night | 33% | | Say high workloads hurt their sleep | 58% | | Have taken a "snooze day" (called in sick because too tired) | 70% |

The weekly stressors people linked to poor sleep were family responsibilities (36%), personal finances (35%), work (34%), personal health (34%) and the geopolitical news cycle (24%).

Country gaps were wide. Singapore sat at 72% for snooze days, level with Australia, while Japan was lowest at 39%. In Singapore, 42% said sleep health is not a priority in their workplace.

Does a bad night really make you more stressed?

The survey is self-report, so it helps to look at controlled experiments. The most comprehensive summary to date, in its authors' words, is a 2024 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin led by Cara Palmer. The team pooled 154 experimental studies with 5,717 participants aged 7 to 79, where sleep was cut short, skipped entirely or broken up on purpose.

Every type of sleep loss lowered positive mood and raised anxiety symptoms. The anxiety effect was moderate in size, a standardized difference of roughly 0.57 to 0.63. Results for negative mood and depressive symptoms were more mixed and depended on how sleep was taken away.

A smaller UC Berkeley study led by Eti Ben Simon with Matthew Walker, published in Nature Human Behaviour, offers one possible mechanism. After a night of total sleep deprivation, anxiety rose about 27% compared with a rested night (that is the corrected figure; UC Berkeley's original press release said up to 30%). Brain scans showed weaker activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in calming emotional reactions. On rested nights, people who got more deep, slow-wave sleep showed bigger drops in anxiety by morning. In a separate online sample, even modest night-to-night dips in sleep tracked with higher anxiety the next day.

So the "33% feel more stressed" line in the survey is not just a feeling. It lines up with what labs keep finding.

Why is it so hard to switch off at night?

Work psychologists call the skill "psychological detachment": actually stopping thinking about work in your off hours, not just leaving the office. A 2017 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Johannes Wendsche and Andrea Lohmann-Haislah, covering 91 samples and more than 38,000 employees, found:

People who detach more report better sleep (a moderate correlation of about 0.30 across 18 samples).
The link was stronger, around 0.4, when detachment meant not dwelling on negative work thoughts.
Doing work tasks in your off hours, like checking email on your phone, went with less detachment (about minus 0.31).
Higher job demands also went with less detachment.

These are correlations, mostly from European samples, so they do not prove cause and effect. They do match the survey's 58% who say workload hurts their sleep.

What actually helps break the stress and sleep loop?

There is no magic switch, but a few habits have reasonable evidence behind them.

Write tomorrow's to-do list before bed. In a 2018 sleep lab study by Michael Scullin's team at Baylor University, 57 young adults spent five minutes writing either a to-do list or a list of things they had already finished. The to-do group fell asleep in about 16 minutes on average, versus about 25 minutes for the other group, and the more specific the list, the faster they dozed off. It was one night in healthy 18 to 30 year olds, so think of it as a cheap experiment, not a cure.
Build a real off switch for work. A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (Karabinski and colleagues, 30 studies, 3,725 people) found that programs designed to help people detach from work had a small to moderate positive effect (d = 0.36). Longer, higher dose programs worked better. At home, that can be as simple as a fixed time when work apps go quiet.
Give yourself a full night. The Berkeley findings hint that deep, slow-wave sleep does some of the overnight emotional reset, and the Palmer review found mood and anxiety effects with partial sleep restriction too, not just all-nighters.
Make the bedroom easy on your body. Heat, noise and light can all break up sleep on their own. In hot, humid places like Singapore, many people pick lighter layers, a fan or air conditioning on a timer. Some like the steady pressure of a weighted blanket while they wind down, which is a comfort choice rather than a treatment. Hot sleepers often go for a cooling weighted blanket with a breathable cover; you can see how one is built on the NightFury specifications page.

If stress or poor sleep goes on for weeks, or starts to affect your work, mood or safety, that is a good reason to talk to a doctor. The survey found 66% of people say they would seek help for ongoing sleep problems, yet only 23% actually have.

The bottom line

In the biggest global survey this year, stress is the most commonly named sleep thief, and short sleep feeds it right back. Lab research supports both directions of that loop. The useful part is that the exits are small: a five-minute list, a clear end to the workday, and a bedroom that does not add more stress.

Sources

Resmed, "Resmed's 2026 Global Sleep Survey" white paper (30,000 respondents, 13 markets, fielded by Cint 11 Dec 2025 to 14 Jan 2026), 2026. https://document.resmed.com/documents/global/Resmed+Sleep+Survey+2026+White+Paper+Report.pdf
Resmed newsroom, "Resmed's Global Sleep Survey Reveals Sleep is One of the Top Health Priorities, but Quality Rest Remains Out of Reach," March 3, 2026. https://newsroom.resmed.com/news-releases/news-details/2026/Resmeds-Global-Sleep-Survey-Reveals-Sleep-is-One-of-the-Top-Health-Priorities-butQuality-Rest-RemainsOut-of-Reach/default.aspx
Resmed, 2026 Global Sleep Survey summary page. https://sleepsurvey.resmed.com/
Palmer CA, Bower JL, Cho KW, Clementi MA, Lau S, Oosterhoff B, Alfano CA, "Sleep loss and emotion: A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 50 years of experimental research," Psychological Bulletin, 2024. doi:10.1037/bul0000410. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38127505/
Ben Simon E, Rossi A, Harvey AG, Walker MP, "Overanxious and underslept," Nature Human Behaviour, 2020. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0754-8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0754-8
Ben Simon E et al., "Author Correction: Overanxious and underslept," Nature Human Behaviour, 2020 (anxiety increase corrected to 27%). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01016-1
UC Berkeley News, "Stressed to the max? Deep sleep can rewire the anxious brain," November 4, 2019. https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/11/04/deep-sleep-can-rewire-the-anxious-brain/
Wendsche J, Lohmann-Haislah A, "A Meta-Analysis on Antecedents and Outcomes of Detachment from Work," Frontiers in Psychology, 2017. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02072. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02072/full
Karabinski T, Haun VC, Nübold A, Wendsche J, Wegge J, "Interventions for improving psychological detachment from work: A meta-analysis," Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 2021. doi:10.1037/ocp0000280. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34096763/
Scullin MK, Krueger ML, Ballard HK, Pruett N, Bliwise DL, "The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2018. doi:10.1037/xge0000374. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29058942/