Impact of Sleep Duration on Emotional Status in Adolescents

Abstract

Background: Chronic sleep deficiency adversely affects emotional and physical health. This study was to identify the current nocturnal sleep duration in South Korean adolescents and to analyze the association of emotional status such as subjective happiness, depression and suicidal attempts with the nocturnal sleep duration. Methods: We calculated sleep duration in a representative sample of South Korean middle- and high-school students according to grade, sex, and survey year using raw data from the Korea Youth Risk Behavior Web-Based Survey from 2007-2011. Students were then categorized by nocturnal sleep duration into sleep groups with 1 hour interval. Emotional status was assessed according to sleep duration. Total sample size was 291,813 which represent 15 million students. Results: Mean sleep duration for 2007-2011 was 6.32 ± 0.01 hours. Over the 90% of adolescents slept less than 8 hours. Sleep duration was dramatically decreased as students became senior grade. The longer sleep duration adolescents had, the more feeling of happiness they had regardless of grade. Vice versa, the lesser sleep duration students had, the more feeling of stress, depression, suicidal ideation and attempts they had. For example, less than 5 hours sleepers chose very unhappy 2.19 (95%CI 1.87-2.57) times more, extremely stressed 5.10 (4.33-6.02), depressions 1.94 (1.86-2.03), suicidal ideation 1.95 (1.85-2.06) and suicidal attempt 1.39 (1.24-1.55) than adolescents with 8-9 hour sleep duration. Conclusions: Sleep deficiency is associated with increasing stress, depression, suicidal ideation and attempts. Appropriate nocturnal sleep duration is critical for emotional health in adolescents.