Neuroticism and sleep: worriers report less rest, but wrist devices show no gap

Students who score high in neuroticism believe they sleep less than others. Yet movement-tracking wristbands worn by those same students record no shorter nights. That mismatch sits at the center of a study by Villanova University researchers Derick M. DeCamp and Elizabeth J. Pantesco, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

The gap in perception is small but consistent. On a five-point neuroticism scale, every additional point went with somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes less sleep in what participants reported. No comparable drop showed up in the device data.

Testing two methods on one group

Neuroticism describes a disposition to feel negative emotions more readily, including distress and worry. Earlier research has often linked the trait to shorter sleep when people describe their own habits. Actigraphy, by contrast, uses a wearable device that infers sleep from movement, and studies based on it have generally not reproduced that link.

To examine the discrepancy directly, the Villanova team recruited 134 undergraduates. Their average age was 19, 95 were women, and none had been diagnosed with a sleep disorder. For five nights, two of them falling on a weekend, every participant slept with an actigraph on the wrist. They also answered questionnaires covering personality and sleep, along with any symptoms of depression or anxiety.

Sleep over the preceding month was assessed in two separate ways. Students first stated how many hours they usually slept. The researchers then derived a second figure from three answers: the usual time of going to bed, the usual time of waking, and how long it typically took to drop off.

Three measures, three averages

The direct question produced an average of 6.74 hours. The wristband came close, at 6.70 hours, while the figure calculated from bedtimes and waking times was noticeably higher, at 7.40 hours.

Measured against the actigraph, more neurotic students gave a lower figure than the device when asked outright. On the calculated estimate, which ran high for the group overall, their overestimation was smaller than that of their peers.

Adjusting for several other factors did not remove the association with self-reported sleep. The researchers controlled for actigraph readings, demographic details, other personality traits, how regular sleep was from one night to the next, body mass index, and symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Those symptoms were closely tied to neuroticism, yet they showed no connection with sleep length, whether measured or reported, and including them left the association intact. According to the authors, this suggests the enduring personality trait matters more than short-lived distress.

Possible explanations

The authors described their results as

“consistent with the possibility that neuroticism is more strongly related to how individuals perceive, recall, and report their sleep duration than to actigraphy-assessed sleep duration.”

One idea they put forward is that people prone to neuroticism remember their nights in a gloomier light or read them more pessimistically. Another is that worrying before bed can make the wait for sleep feel longer. Neither explanation has been confirmed, since the study did not directly measure reporting bias or mistakes in recall.

Other readings are also possible, the authors noted. A more neurotic person may spend longer motionless in bed without actually sleeping, a state the wristband could still record as sleep. Both the personality scores and the usual sleep figures came from the students themselves, so a shared tendency in how they answer questionnaires could explain part of the link.

Study limitations

The time frames did not match: questions referred to the previous month, while the devices recorded just five nights, a period that may be too short to capture typical sleep and that makes direct comparison harder. Knowing they were being monitored may have led some participants to change how they slept. The sample was also narrow, made up of college students from one private university, most of them women.

The paper is titled “Neuroticism is associated with self-reported, but not actigraphy-assessed, sleep duration.”