Day-to-day relationships between mind-wandering, sleep quality, and mood across three intensive longitudinal studies

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Impaired subjective sleep quality is associated with lower cognitive performance and poor mental health. Mind-wandering (MW) or daydreaming is a state of the human mind when the focus of attention shifts from the ongoing task and the external environment toward internally generated cognitive and emotional processes. Cross-sectional research has shown that poor sleep and negative mood are associated with increased MW, however, it is unknown whether these relations are uni- or bidirectional. Method(s) We investigated the day-to-day dynamics between subjective sleep quality, mind-wandering, and mood across three experience sampling studies in university student samples. The first study included healthy individuals (N = 73,2758 observations) with medium or high trait schizotypy, the second sample included students with high dream recall frequency (N = 55,2078 observations), and the third contained a general student sample (N = 61,1119 observations) who were surveyed during the second and third waves of the Covid pandemic. Data were analyzed with mixed-effect modeling where we separated within and between-person effects. Result(s) Poor sleep quality predicted more MW during the day across all studies, and this relationship was more pronounced within than across individuals. However, if we included mood as a predictor (daytime or right after awakening) sleep quality was no longer significant. On the other hand, more MW significantly predicted lower sleep quality during the night, but the size of the effect was negligible. Elevated trait depression scores were significant predictors of worse sleep quality and more MW but again, if mood was included in the models, then higher trait depression was no longer significant. Conclusion(s) Our findings suggest a unidirectional association of poor sleep with lower mental health and mind-wandering. MW seems more affected by within-person fluctuations in sleep quality. These findings strengthen the evidence that striving for better sleep hygiene is key to functioning and being well during the day, even among healthy young adults.