An Analysis of Sleep Disturbances Interacting with Rumination and Childhood Adversity as a Longitudinal Predictor for Depression and Anxiety

Abstract

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals experienced turbulent changes in their mental wellbeing and daily routines. To investigate whether and how sleep disturbance predicted depression and anxiety during this unprecedented public health crisis, this study used a longitudinal dataset (N = 1,518) spanning across the first two years of the pandemic, from March 2020 to November 2021. Additionally, this study examined how rumination and childhood adversity may interact with sleep disturbance to prospectively affect depression or anxiety. Depression and anxiety at the end of 2020 and 2021 were regressed on sleep disturbance, at the beginning of 2020 and 2021, in interaction with rumination and childhood adversity as predictor variables. It was determined that high rumination always exacerbated the relationship between sleep disturbances and affective psychopathology. On the other hand, the 2021 models showed that high childhood adversity, when paired with low rumination, can actually have an inverse effect on the aforementioned correlation. If these results can be explained by the potentially inoculating effect of childhood adversity, then these results may imply potential areas of research in combining current psychiatric inoculation strategies with cognitive behavioral therapy, a way to remedy rumination, as a preventative measure for those at high risk for depression or anxiety.