Abstract
While there is a large body of evidence that poor subjective sleep quality is related to lower subjective well-being, studies on the relation of objective sleep measures and subjective well-being are fewer in number and less consistent in their findings. Using data of the Survey of Mid-Life in the United States (MIDUS), we investigated whether duration and quality of sleep, assessed by actigraphy, were related to subjective well-being and whether this relationship was mediated by subjective sleep quality. Three hundred and thirteen mainly white American individuals from the general population and 128 urban-dwelling African American individuals between 35 and 85 years of age were studied cross-sectionally. Sleep duration, variability of sleep duration, sleep onset latency, and time awake after sleep onset were assessed by actigraphy over a period of 7 days. Subjective sleep quality was assessed with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, positive psychological well-being and symptoms of psychological distress were assessed with the Satisfaction with Life Scale and the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire. In both white and African Americans high day-to-day variability in sleep duration was related to lower levels of subjective well-being controlling age, gender, educational and marital status, and BMI. By contrast, sleep duration, sleep onset latency, and time awake after sleep onset were not related to subjective well-being controlling covariates and other sleep variables. Moreover, the relationship between variability in sleep duration and well-being was partially mediated by subjective sleep quality. The findings show that great day-to-day variability in sleep duration – more than average sleep duration – is related to poor subjective sleep quality and poor subjective well-being.
Highlights
Subjective well-being, a construct that includes general satisfaction with life and positive affect [1,2], is widely linked to better health and greater longevity [3,4], and there is ongoing interest in the factors that predict well-being [1,5]
Individuals who reported poor sleep quality and short sleep duration were consistently lower in subjective well-being and reported increased levels of negative affect and mood disturbances when compared to individuals who reported good sleep quality and/or 7–8 hours of sleep per night [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
Jean-Louis and coworkers [15] found no relationship between actigraphic assessments of sleep duration, sleep onset latency, and sleep efficiency with subjective well-being in an adult general population sample
Summary
Subjective well-being, a construct that includes general satisfaction with life and positive affect [1,2], is widely linked to better health and greater longevity [3,4], and there is ongoing interest in the factors that predict well-being [1,5]. Recent studies suggest that poor sleep [6,7,8,9,10,11,12] can impair well-being, but most of these studies have involved individuals’ perceptions of sleep quality and duration; only a few studies have examined associations with objectively-assessed sleep. Such assessments are important given well-documented dissociations between subjective reports of sleep quality and objective sleep measurement [13,14,15]. Reports of daytime fatigue were more strongly related to poor subjective sleep quality and poor mental health in this study
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