Daily coping moderates the relations between stress and actigraphic sleep: a daily intensive longitudinal study with...

Theoretical models argue that coping reduces stress responses, yet no studies have tested whether coping moderates the prospective stress effects on sleep in daily life.

This study tested if coping moderates the stress-sleep association using a daily, intensive longitudinal design across 7-12 days.

326 young adults (M_age = 23.24 ± 5.46) reported perceived stress and coping (problem-focused, emotional-approach, and avoidance) every evening between 20:00-02:00, providing over 2400 nights of sleep data and 3000 stress surveys from all participants. Actigraphy and sleep diaries measured total-sleep-time and sleep efficiency. Multilevel models tested the interaction effects of within- and between-person stress and coping on sleep.

Within-person problem-focused and emotional-approach coping moderated the within-person stress effects on actigraphic total-sleep-time (both p = 0.02); higher stress predicted shorter total-sleep-time only during high use of problem-focused or emotional-approach coping (both p = 0.01). Between-person avoidance moderated the between-person stress effect on actigraphic total-sleep-time (p = 0.04); higher stress predicted shorter total-sleep-time for high avoidance coping (p = 0.02). Within-person emotional-approach coping buffered the between-person stress effect on actigraphic sleep efficiency (p = 0.02); higher stress predicted higher sleep efficiency for high emotional-approach coping (p = 0.04).

This study showed that daily coping moderates the effects of evening stress on sleep that night. More efforts to cope with stress before bedtime had a short-term cost of shorter sleep that night. However, high use of emotional-approach coping buffered the impact of stress to promote sleep efficiency.