New research suggests that it is better to have a short duration of sleep without interruption than to be interrupted while sleeping, Geek Snack reported.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that awakening several times throughout the night is more detrimental to people's positive moods than getting the same shortened amount of sleep without interruption.

"When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don't have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration," Patrick Finan, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from studied 62 healthy men and women randomly subjected to three sleep experimental conditions in an inpatient clinical research suite: three consecutive nights of forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes or uninterrupted sleep.

They found that participants subjected to eight forced awakenings and those with delayed bedtimes showed similar low positive mood and high negative mood after the first night, as measured by a standard mood assessment questionnaire administered before bedtimes. Participants were asked to rate how strongly they felt a variety of positive and negative emotions, such as cheerfulness or anger.

Researchers found that significant differences emerged after the second night: The forced awakening group had a reduction of 31 percent in positive mood, while the delayed bedtime group had a decline of 12 percent compared to the first day, Fox News reported. Researchers add they did not find significant differences in negative mood between the two groups on any of the three days, which suggests that sleep fragmentation is especially detrimental to positive mood.

Finan says the study also suggests that the effects of interrupted sleep on positive mood can be cumulative, since the group differences emerged after the second night and continued the day after the third night of the study.

"You can imagine the hard time people with chronic sleep disorders have after repeatedly not reaching deep sleep," Finan said.

The findings are detailed in the journal Sleep.