Sleep 6.4 Exploring the Factors Influencing Sleep Regularity

Highlights the demographic, socioeconomic, and lifestyle factors shaping consistent or irregular sleep patterns.

Video Breakdown:

00:00 Introduction to Sleep Regularity

01:43 Factors Influencing Sleep Regularity

02:44 Socioeconomic and Lifestyle Impacts on Sleep

Now, I wanted to delve a little bit into the associated factors of sleep regularity, and what is correlated with sleep irregularity itself.
You would think that sleep regularity would be related to sleep duration, but that's not always the case. And this again, is from the MESA or the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis done in 2018, and about 2000 individuals with a mean age of 68 years of age. The X axis here is the SRI index, going from zero to a hundred, and then you have the total sleep time here on the Y axis, and you can see that the irregularity or regularity index, actually higher means that you're more regular, does not necessarily correlate with increased, or decreased, sleep duration. And you could see what this study did was they took a case example, took a single time point, in this graph, found out the raster plot of this individual. And you can see the highly regular data here, but you can see that the average duration is around total sleep time is maybe around 420 minutes or something like that.
This individual who had intermediate levels of SRI had some irregularities, but again, not that far off from the person with high regularity. And then this individual having the worst regularity had a total sleep time of about 500 minutes.
So not entirely related with between the sleep irregularity and sleep duration. What other associated factors can we think of sleep regularity? There's age. In fact, we know that adolescents, young adults have a very erratic sleep behavior pattern, adolescents particularly. And as we age, we tend to be a little more regular.
Obviously this differs as you start to develop more chronic conditions, insomnia, et cetera. In general, this is the relationship that's out there in the literature. In terms of gender, this is still an evolving area, but it seems that men have a little bit more of an irregular schedule compared to women.
Then in terms of race, there appears to be higher irregularity in minority groups, particularly black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and white Americans. And this is an actual graph that I pulled out from an FFCWS data sheet, and you could pull it out here from this link. There is a positive correlation between irregularity and lower socioeconomic status.
Those individuals in the lower socioeconomic status, probably due to stress, probably due to requirement of shift work, probably a number of factors, just have more irregular sleep. And then chronotype. Those people who are night owls who tend to stay up later in night, they tend to have more irregular sleep times. And being a parent.
For many of us who are parents, this only seems natural and obvious. You tend to have more irregular schedules compared to those who do not have children. And then irregular light exposure tends to lead to higher sleep irregularity as well. And then more napping naturally leads to increase sleep irregularity.
There's a little bit of the citations here. It's a little hard to see, but you could find this out in general, and again, this is, correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, except for maybe parenthood. I think that's pretty obvious to me. But I think, this is an evolving area where, continue evidence is coming in.

Course episodes

Sleep 6.1 Intro to Sleep Regularity

Sleep 6.2 The Clinical Importance of Sleep Regularity

Sleep 6.3 Physiological Mechanisms of Sleep Regularity

Sleep 6.4 Exploring the Factors Influencing Sleep Regularity

Sleep 6.5 Understanding Sleep Regularity Metrics

Sleep 6.6 Future Innovations in Sleep Monitoring