The role of sleep in adolescents' daily stress recovery: Negative affect spillover and positive affect bounce‐back effects^☆

Abstract

The present study examined the role of sleep in daily affective stress recovery processes in adolescents. Eighty-nine American adolescents recorded their emotions and stress through daily surveys and sleep with Fitbit devices for two weeks. Results show that objectively measured sleep (sleep onset latency and sleep debt) moderated negative affective responses to previous-day stress, such that stress-related negative affect spillover effects became more pronounced as amount of sleep decreased. Total sleep time and sleep debt moderated cross-day positive affect "bounce-back" effects. With more sleep, morning positive affect on days following high stress tended to bounce back to the levels that were common following low stress days. Conversely, if sleep was short following high stress days, positive affect remained low the next morning. No evidence for subjective sleep quality as a moderator of spillover/bounce-back effects was found. This research suggests that sleep quantity could relate to overnight affective stress recovery.Adolescence is a developmental period that is notorious for insufficient sleep (Carskadon, 2011). Given the importance of sleep on virtually all aspects of emotional processing (Kahn, Sheppes, & Sadeh, 2013;Palmer & Alfano, 2017), it seems likely that sleep, either duration or quality, could play a part in emotional recovery from daily stress for adolescents. It is important to understand processes of stress recovery because stress is an inevitable aspect of life and the ability to "bounce back" (i.e., recover) from it has important implications for overall emotional well-being (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). Research on recovery from daily stressors has largely focused on negative affect spillover effects from one day to the next (Bolger & Zuckerman, 1995;Gunthert, Cohen, Butler, & Beck, 2007;Marco & Suls, 1993). However, few researchers have investigated daily-level processes that might relate to everyday fluctuations in stress recovery, such as sleep. In this study, we investigated the role of daily sleep on stress recovery among adolescents. Sleep in adolescentsA majority of adolescents do not receive enough sleep (National Sleep Foundation, 2014). Although sleep experts recommend that adolescents sleep for 8-10 h a night, about 70% of adolescents sleep less than 8 h a night, and a large proportion get substantially less than 8 h. Average sleep duration decreases from 8.4 h per night in sixth grade to 6.9 h in 12th grade (Hirshkowitz et al., 2015; Paruthi et al., 2016).To a large extent, inadequate sleep in teenagers can be attributed to a confluence of biological and social changes that delay

Affective recovery from stress and its associations with sleep

“…Despite research on the dynamic links between stress, emotions, and sleep, studies examining the relationship between sleep and affective recovery from acute stress are sparse. A few studies have examined these relationships in daily life, finding that poor sleep is associated with poor negative affective recovery on days with a high number of negative events (Hamilton et al, 2008) as well as next day positive affect recovery (Chue, Gunthert, Kim, Alfano, & Ruggiero, 2018). These studies capture sleep and affect recovery in a naturalistic setting but are unable to control specific stressor qualities that may influence these associations.…”

Pre-pandemic sleep behavior and adolescents’ stress during Covid-19: a prospective longitudinal study

“…Inadequate sleep is a significant risk factor for increased stress levels [ 26 – 30 ], whereas optimized sleep is linked to reduced stress [ 29 , 31 ]. Identifying specific sleep behaviors that can contribute to or reduce high level of stress would be important because such work could allow us to identify modifiable targets for interventions aimed at lowering adolescents’ stress and reducing the pathogenic impact of stress on their mental health.…”

Overnight affective dynamics and sleep characteristics as predictors of depression and its development in women

“…On a neurobiological level, poor sleep seems to prohibit individuals from “resetting the correct affective brain reactivity” to emotional challenges the next day (by restoring functional connectivity between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex) [ 16 ]. In addition, an observational study among adolescents examined the role of sleep duration on overnight affective inertia of daily stress-related affect (referred in the study as spillover effects) [ 17 ]. On average, small and non-significant stress-related affective spillover effects were found.…”