Abstract
We examined the relationship between sleep and the affective components of subjective well-being as well as psychological well-being, and between sleep and academic performance, of full-time undergraduate students in a residential college at the National University of Singapore. The aspects of sleep considered were self-reported sleep duration, sleep efficiency, frequency of sleep disturbances, daytime dysfunction, sleep latency and overall sleep quality, as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Academic performance was measured using self-reported cumulative average point scores, typically known as grade point average in other institutions. Psychological well-being and the affective components of subjective well-being were assessed using the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience, respectively. With the exception of sleep latency, our univariate analysis revealed significant associations between the abovementioned facets of sleep, and the affective components of subjective well-being. The analysis also revealed significant associations between the above sleep variables and psychological well-being, except sleep latency and frequency of sleep disturbances. Only daytime dysfunction was found to be significantly correlated with academic performance in our univariate analysis. In addition, our multivariate analysis shows that psychological well-being, affect balance and academic performance each has a direct effect on overall sleep quality. The relationship between overall sleep quality and psychological well-being is U-shaped, while that between overall sleep quality and affect balance is linear and moderated by psychological well-being. The relationship between overall sleep quality and academic performance is either U-shaped or an inverted-U, depending on the level of psychological well-being, which moderates the relationship. These nonlinear relationships indicate that individuals with the highest levels of psychological well-being are not the best sleepers (in terms of overall sleep quality), neither are the highest academic achievers necessarily the best sleepers.
Highlights
It is known that sleep/wake timing shifts later due to pubertal changes of the circadian timing and homeostatic sleep systems during the second decade of life
We examined the strength of association between sleep and psychological well-being, as well as between sleep and CAP scores, using the Spearman rank correlation coefficient as well as the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (As both correlation measures resulted in the same set of statistically significant associations, we report our findings in terms of the former measure for brevity)
Both Global Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and daytime dysfunction correlate moderately with the four well-being measures (All eight correlation indices are significant at the 0.01 level)
Summary
It is known that sleep/wake timing shifts later due to pubertal changes of the circadian timing and homeostatic sleep systems during the second decade of life. University students living in halls of residence face additional challenges that can further affect their quality of sleep. Problems in their sleep environment may include noise and roommates’ different habits (Qin and Brown, 2017). The demands to contribute to the communal life of the hall and to integrate socially in its high-density living environment (Zhai et al, 2018), the stress from short-term academic workload and long-term anxiety related to independent adult life (Lemma et al, 2012; Laidlaw et al, 2016), and the lack of knowledge and practice of good sleep hygiene (Suen et al, 2010; Dinis and Braganca, 2018), further add to these problems. University students are viewed as being chronically sleep-deprived (Curcio et al, 2006; Fonseca and Genzel, 2020)
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