Background:

Recent studies have found bi-directional relations between stress and sleep. However, few studies have examined the daily associations between stress and electroencephalography (EEG) measured sleep.

Purpose:

This study examined the temporal associations between repeated ecological momentary assessments of stress and EEG-estimated sleep.

Methods:

Ninety-eight international or interstate undergraduate students (Mage = 20.54 ± 1.64, 76.5% female, 84.7% Asian) reported their stress levels four times daily at morning awakening, afternoon, evening, and pre-bedtime across 15 consecutive days (>4,000 total observations). Next-day stress was coded as an average of morning, afternoon, and evening stress. Z-Machine Insight+ recorded over 1,000 nights EEG total sleep time (TST), sleep onset latency, wake after sleep onset, sleep efficiency (SE), slow-wave sleep (SWS), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep duration. Multilevel models, adjusted for covariates (i.e., sociodemographic, health factors, and daily covariates) and lagged outcomes, tested the daily within- and between-level stress-sleep associations.

Results:

After adjusting for covariates, within-person shorter TST (b = -0.11 [-0.21, -0.01], p = .04), lower SE (b = -0.02 [-0.03, 0.00], p = .04), less SWS (b = -0.38 [-0.66, -0.10], p = .008), and less REM sleep (b = -0.32 [-0.53, -0.10], p = .004) predicted higher next-day stress. Pre-bedtime stress did not predict same-night sleep. No significant results emerged at the between-person level.

Conclusions:

These findings demonstrate that poor or short sleep, measured by EEG, is predictive of higher next-day stress. Results for sleep architecture support the role of SWS and REM sleep in regulating the perception of stress. Given that only within-person effects were significant, these findings highlight the importance of examining night-to-night fluctuations in sleep affecting next-day stress and its impact on daytime functioning.