A cross-sectional study on healthcare workers' sleep and psychological resilience

Healthcare workers, as a high-stress professional group, face long-term high-intensity workloads and complex medical environments, resulting in increasingly prominent mental health issues. In particular, the widespread presence of anxiety symptoms and somatic pain has become a major factor affecting both the quality of care and the career development of healthcare workers. This study aims to investigate the mediating and moderating roles of psychological resilience and sleep in the relationship between somatic pain and anxiety among healthcare workers.

A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted among 1 661 healthcare workers. The instruments used included the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), item 3 from the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10) for psychological resilience, and the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for assessing anxiety, sleep disturbance, psychological resilience, and somatic pain.

The detection rate of anxiety symptoms among healthcare workers was 38.95%. Psychological resilience was significantly negatively correlated with anxiety symptoms (r=-0.451, P<0.01), sleep disturbance (r=-0.313, P<0.01), and somatic pain (r=-0.214, P<0.01). Moreover, psychological resilience partially mediated the relationship between somatic pain and anxiety (β=-0.103, P<0.01), and sleep quality moderated the latter part of the mediation model ("somatic pain-psychological resilience-anxiety").

Under high-intensity workloads, healthcare workers generally experience severe anxiety symptoms. Psychological resilience plays an important protective mediating role in their mental health, and sleep quality serves as a moderator in this relationship. Enhancing healthcare workers' psychological resilience and improving their sleep may promote both their physical and mental well-being.