Sleep Resilience: Introducing A Novel Dimension of Sleep Health

Sleep resilience is the ability to function well following sleep disturbance. We developed novel Sleep Resilience Questionnaires (SRQ) to assess current and future sleep resilience. This study investigated how sleep disturbance (SD) and sleep-related impairments (SRI) related to future sleep resilience across demographic variables. Participants (N=455) ages 18-85 (M=45) completed an online Qualtrics survey of demographic variables, PROMIS-SD and -SRI short form questionnaires, and the SRQ-future that asked participants to estimate their resilience in the face of future sleep disturbance. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine factors of the SD, SRI, and SRQ-future questionnaires. The most sensitive items for modeling were retained for subsequent structural equation modeling (SEM) that examined whether demographics, SD, or SRI predicted SRQ-future latent factors. CFA confirmed that the SRQ items reliably measure of sleep resilience. Results found that future estimated sleep resilience is related to (1) older age, (2) lower education, and (3) lower current sleep related impairment but not sleep disturbance. Less education may promote sleep resilience. This, along with the finding that younger individuals appear to be less resilient in the future, suggests that there is a sleep health disparity that could be targeted through targeting sleep resilience in early life. Sleep related impairment may naturally decrease estimated sleep resilience but sleep disturbance alone does not. Our future research will explore how sleep resilience, as an important dimension of sleep health, relates to assessment of sleep disorder and can be targeted at the societal level to promote sleep health.