Financial Stress Steals Sleep Quality through Bedtime Behaviors

Persistent financial stress may be robbing workers of quality sleep long before their heads hit the pillow, according to a new longitudinal study that links economic stress to harmful bedtime behaviors that ultimately degrade sleep quality.

The study, accepted to the Journal of Business adn Psychology this September, set out to answer a question that has gained urgency amid rising economic instability: How do financial strain, job insecurity and dependence on one’s paycheck translate into poor sleep health over time?

!Rebecca M. Broissoit, Ph.D.

Rebecca M. Brossoit, Ph.D., of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University, who was the lead author of the paper, noted while prior studies have tied economic stress to poor sleep outcomes, the mechanisms behind that relationship have remained less clear.

So, she and her colleagues focused on what they call “stress before bed behaviors,” rumination, worry and emotional activation at bedtime as a potential pathway linking money stress to impaired sleep.

The study followed 704 full-time working adults who were members of the Army and Air National Guard in a Pacific Northwest U.S.state. Participants completed surveys at three time points (baseline, four months and nine months) and a large subset also wore wrist actigraphy devices for 21 consecutive days to objectively measure sleep.

“People typically report sleeping longer then what is collected on sleep trackers; in this study, the discrepancy was close to an hour,” Brossoit told MHE.

The sample was predominantly male (about 75%), mostly White, with an average age in the mid-30s, and represented a wide range of income levels, from under $25,000 to over $150,000 annually.

At baseline, researchers measured three distinct economic stressors: financial strain (difficulty living on current income), economic dependency on one’s job for basic survival and job insecurity.Four months later, participants reported how frequently they went to bed feeling stressed, angry, and worried.