Losing Sleep Over It: Family, Friend and Academic Stress and Sleep Disruption in Older Adolescents

• In Event: 3-084 - The Influence of Parental Risk Factors and Extrafamilial Stressors on Sleep from Infancy to Emerging Adulthood

Integrative Statement

Background. Although sleep hours are influenced by behavioral choices, sleep is also a stress-sensitive system, with both sleep hours and quality being highly responsive to environmental cues of threat and safety. This allostatic quality of sleep was likely adaptive during human evolution; it makes sense to sleep less and more lightly in times of danger, in order to be more vigilant to one’s potentially harmful surroundings. Modern stressors typically require cognitive rather than physical action, but the sleep-impinging effects of stress exposure persist, to the detriment of individual health as well as cognitive and behavioral functioning. Adolescents are especially likely to suffer from shortened sleep as a result of owl-like shifts in sleep timing, combined with early school start times. While we know that perceived stress also affects adolescent sleep, there has been little systematic comparison of which types of stressors are most sleep-impairing for adolescents.

Methods. In the current study, we employ data from a subsample of 144 older adolescents from the Youth Emotion Project, linking the presence and severity of multiple types of stressors in adolescents lives, assessed using Hammen’s Life Stress Interview (LSI), to sleep hours and quality, assessed objectively using actigraphy and subjectively through the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Stress domains assessed on the LSI included chronic stress levels emerging from: close friendships, social life, romantic relationships, family relationships, neighborhood stress, school or academic stress, work stress, finances, personal health and family health.

Results. In bivariate correlations between stressor types and sleep outcomes, chronic stress from adolescents’ close friendships predicted objectively measured hours of sleep (r = -.21, p = .01) and sleep efficiency (r =-.19, p =.02). School and work stress also predicted lower sleep efficiency (r =.-.19, p =.03; r =-.20, p =.02, respectively). Chronic stress from adolescents social lives (r = .19, p = .02), family relationships (r = .34, p < .001), family health (r = .19, p = .03), and school experiences (r = .22, p = .01) were significant predictors of worse perceived sleep quality (higher values indicate worse sleep quality on the PSQI).
Multiple regression analyses including all stressor types simultaneously and controlling for gender, SES, race-ethnicity, and neuroticism revealed that close friendship stress independently and significantly predicted lower total actigraph sleep hours (b = -.24, p = .03). In predicting sleep efficiency, male gender was associated with lower sleep efficiency (b = -3.3, p = .05); none of the chronic stressors were significant controlling for covariates and all other stressor types. In predicting subjective sleep quality from the PSQI, family and school stressors continued to significantly predict worse sleep quality (b = 1.8, p = .001; b = 1.5, p = .01 respectively), above and beyond covariates and each other.

Conclusion. Each of family relationships, close friendships and school stressors were significant predictors of aspects of sleep hours and/or quality, above and beyond demographic factors and other stressor types, indicating that family, friend and school stressors each make unique contributions to sleep disruption among older adolescents.

Authors

• Emma Adam, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Collier Villaume, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ednah Ezichi Nwafor, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Addie Shrodes, Northwestern University
  Non-Presenting Author