Elsevier

Behavior Therapy

Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 67-82
Behavior Therapy

Repetitive Thought Impairs Sleep Quality: An Experience Sampling Study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2013.09.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined the association between repetitive thought and sleep in daily-life.

  • We used experience sampling method and ambulatory monitoring of physical activity.

  • Repetitive thought in the evening was associated with reduced sleep quality.

  • Impaired sleep leads to next-day mood problems and further repetitive thought.

  • Self-reinforcing cycle involving repetitive thought, mood, and sleep quality exists.

Abstract

Although previous research has suggested that presleep negative cognitive activities are associated with poor sleep quality, there is little evidence regarding the association between negative thoughts and sleep in real-life settings. The present study used experience sampling and long-term sleep monitoring with actigraphy to investigate the relationships among negative repetitive thought, mood, and sleep problems. During a 1-week sampling period, 43 undergraduate students recorded their thought content and mood eight times a day at semirandom intervals. In addition to these subjective reports, participants wore actigraphs on their wrists in order to measure sleep parameters. Analyses using multilevel modeling showed that repetitive thought in the evening was significantly associated with longer sleep-onset latency, decreased sleep efficiency, and reduced total sleep time. Furthermore, impaired sleep quality was significantly associated with reduced positive affect the next morning, and decreased positive affect was indirectly associated with increased repetitive thought in the evening. These findings suggest the existence of a self-reinforcing cycle involving repetitive thought, mood, and impaired sleep quality, highlighting the importance of cognitive and emotional factors in enhancement and maintenance of good-quality sleep.

Section snippets

Participants

A group of 49 undergraduate students (38 female; average age = 19.4, SD = 1.3) was recruited from introductory psychology courses across several universities in Japan.1

Results

On average, participants went to bed at 1:36 a.m. and rose at 8:10 a.m. Means, standard deviations, and ranges of ESM variables and other sleep parameters are presented in Table 1. Before conducting the main analyses, we compared thought contents between high and low repetitive thought scores in order to validate our momentary repetitive thought scale. We noted 26 thoughts with a score of 21 (7 on each of the three self-focus, unpleasantness, and uncontrollability items), and 17 thoughts with a

Discussion

In this study, we observed naturally occurring repetitive thought and moods at various times of the day in daily-life settings by using an ESM paradigm, and investigated their associations with objective measurements of sleep quality obtained by an actigraph. We tested three main hypotheses regarding the interrelationships between repetitive thought, moods, and sleep. First, we hypothesized that repetitive thought would have a significant influence on nighttime sleep quality, and that this

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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  • Cited by (0)

    This study was supported by grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (21-10591). We would like to express our gratitude for the assistance provided by the staff of the Self-Focus Research Project at Nihon University: Tomomi Hashimoto, Mari Inaba, Haruka Ishikura, Ryuichiro Kuki, Mayou Sohyama, and Rika Ueno.

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