Relationships Among Nightly Sleep Quality, Daily Stress, and Daily Affect

We explored the prospective, microlevel relationship between nightly sleep quality (SQ) and the subsequent day's stress on positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) as well as the moderating relationships between nightly SQ, subsequent stress, and subsequent PA on NA. We investigated whether age moderated these relationships.

We collected 56 days of sleep, stress, and affect data using daily diary questionnaires (N = 552). We used multilevel modeling to assess relationships at the between- and within-person levels.

Daily increases in SQ and decreases in stress interacted to predict higher daily PA and lower daily NA. Better SQ in older adults enhanced the benefits of PA on the stress-NA relationship more during times of low stress, whereas better sleep in younger adults enhanced the benefits of PA more during times of high stress. Between-person effects were stronger predictors of well-being outcomes than within-person variability.

The combination of good SQ and higher PA buffered the impact of stress on NA. The moderating impact of age suggests that sleep and stress play different roles across adulthood. Targeting intervention and prevention strategies to improve SQ and enhance PA could disrupt the detrimental relationship between daily stress and NA.