Sleepless Longing: Bidirectional Associations Between Sleep Quality and Prolonged Grief in Daily Life After Traumatic...

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Sleep Science
• Grief Research

Background:

• Sleep disturbances are prevalent in bereavement, particularly for individuals with prolonged grief disorder (PGD).
• Existing research shows links between PGD and poor sleep, but the temporal relationship is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the day-to-day associations between sleep quality and prolonged grief symptoms in traumatically bereaved adults.
• To examine the directionality and timing of the effects between sleep and grief.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a 14-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) protocol with a smartphone app.
• Assessed prolonged grief (PG) symptoms five times daily and sleep quality each morning.
• Employed linear mixed models to analyze within-person, lagged effects.

Main Results:

• Prolonged grief symptoms did not predict subsequent sleep quality.
• Lower sleep quality was associated with increased daytime PG severity, though this finding was not robust in sensitivity analyses.
• The association between sleep quality and PG levels was strongest in the morning and attenuated throughout the day.

Conclusions:

• Findings tentatively support a sleep-to-grief pathway, suggesting poor sleep may temporarily exacerbate PG symptoms.
• Small effect sizes and data variability necessitate replication in larger samples.
• Further research is needed to explore causal mechanisms linking sleep and grief dynamics.