Abstract
Troubled sleep is a commonly cited consequence of adolescent drug use, but it has rarely been studied as a cause. Nor have there been any studies of the extent to which sleep behavior can spread in social networks from person to person to person. Here we map the social networks of 8,349 adolescents in order to study how sleep behavior spreads, how drug use behavior spreads, and how a friend's sleep behavior influences one's own drug use. We find clusters of poor sleep behavior and drug use that extend up to four degrees of separation (to one's friends' friends' friends' friends) in the social network. Prospective regression models show that being central in the network negatively influences future sleep outcomes, but not vice versa. Moreover, if a friend sleeps ≤7 hours, it increases the likelihood a person sleeps ≤7 hours by 11%. If a friend uses marijuana, it increases the likelihood of marijuana use by 110%. Finally, the likelihood that an individual uses drugs increases by 19% when a friend sleeps ≤7 hours, and a mediation analysis shows that 20% of this effect results from the spread of sleep behavior from one person to another. This is the first study to suggest that the spread of one behavior in social networks influences the spread of another. The results indicate that interventions should focus on healthy sleep to prevent drug use and targeting specific individuals may improve outcomes across the entire social network.
Highlights
In 2006, 15.7% of 8th-graders and 42.3% of 12th-graders had tried marijuana at least once, and about 18% of 12th-graders were current users in the United States [1]
We considered the prospective effect of social network variables (such as network centrality–which measures how central a person is in a network) and friends’ overall behavior on ego’s future sleep behavior and drug use
The evidence suggests that poor sleep leads to drug use in adolescents, and that both sleep and drug use spread through social networks
Summary
In 2006, 15.7% of 8th-graders and 42.3% of 12th-graders had tried marijuana at least once, and about 18% of 12th-graders were current users in the United States [1]. Inability to sleep and excessive sleepiness are often cited as primary warning signs and symptoms of such teenage drug abuse [2]. The implication is that drug abuse causes sleep problems. In previous studies of adolescent use of opioids [3], alcohol [4], and marijuana [5,6,7,8], researchers have generally assumed that the causal direction is from substance abuse to sleep problems. One of the biggest adjustments affecting late adolescence is the significant change in chronotype with the delay of the intrinsic sleep phase [9]. Coping with delayed sleep phase becomes problematic for teens who need to wake up early for morning classes, resulting in average weeknight sleep durations around 7 hours per night [10]–much less than the 8.50–9.25 hours needed at this phase of their lives [11]
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