Sleep regularity key to wellbeing

Sep 2 2013

By Lucy Piper, Senior medwireNews Reporter

Ensuring regularity in nighttime sleep duration could improve subjective wellbeing to a greater degree than lengthening total sleep time, study findings show.

The results showed that variability of total sleep time was the most consistent actigraph measure of sleep to predict poorer subjective wellbeing, measured on the Satisfaction with Life Scale and the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire, after taking into account age, gender, educational and marital status, and body mass index.

“This effect was partially mediated by subjective sleep quality,” as measured using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, say lead researcher Sakari Lemola (University of Basel, Switzerland) and colleagues, and was present in a sample of 313 mainly White American individuals from the general population and in a cohort of 128 urban-dwelling African–American individuals.

Higher levels of waking after sleep onset were also indirectly related to poorer subjective wellbeing and mediated by subjective sleep quality, whereas average total sleep time had no effect, either directly or indirectly.

The findings are consistent with research relating large intra-individual day-to-day variability in sleep with “high stress levels and negative affect in adults… and to lower levels of subjective well-being and functional status in older demented individuals,” say the researchers.

They also note that irregular sleep durations may trigger insomnia. “Individuals who sleep poorly on one night may want to ‘catch up’ by sleeping longer on the subsequent night,” the team explains in PLoS One, but this “recovery sleep” can result in worse sleep the following night by undermining the ability to fall asleep.

“Thus, one possible interpretation of our findings is that a highly variable sleep schedule may provoke sleep problems and poor subjective well-being,” Lemola and colleagues comment.

They say the findings corroborate “the common sense notion” that limiting variability in day-to-day sleep duration could lead to better subjective sleep quality and, in turn, higher levels of subjective wellbeing.

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