Improving your sleep quality is as beneficial to health and happiness as winning the lottery, new research from the University of Warwick has found.

After analysing the sleep patterns of more than 30,500 people in British households over four years, scientists at the Department of Psychology found sleeping well gives a mood boost similar to a scooping jackpot of £120,000 or practicing mindfulness.

The study, published in the journal Sleep, showed that as people’s sleep improved over time so did their scores on the General Health Questionnaire, which is used by mental health professionals to monitor psychological well-being.

Lead author Dr Nicole Tang’s said the research showed that improving the quality and quantity of sleep among the population is an effective, simple and cheap method of raising the health and wellbeing of society as a whole.

But she cautioned against using sleeping pills to get rest, as they lowered well-being scores.

“The current findings suggest that a positive change in sleep is linked to better physical and mental well-being further down the line,” said Dr Tang.

“It is refreshing to see the healing potential of sleep outside of clinical trial settings, as this goes to show that the benefits of better sleep are accessible to everyone and not reserved for those with extremely bad sleep requiring intensive treatments.