Exploring the impact and relationship of symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress with sleep quality in college students

Aims: The emergence of mental-health concerns amongst the college student population is currently increasing. Along with this, sleep problems are becoming a leading concern with regards to mental health issues. The current study sought to investigate the impact of mental-health problems, (symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress) and how they might be interacting with sleep quality. It was hypothesised that depression, anxiety and stress symptoms would all relate to components of sleep quality and would predict poor sleep quality scores.

Methods: An Irish college student sample was recruited (n = 95) through convenience sampling. Cross-sectional measures were used to examine and survey students: DASS-21 was used to test for symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. PSQI was used to test for “good sleepers” and “poor sleepers” and the different dimensions of sleep quality.

Results: The results showed the number of poor sleepers to be alarmingly high (91.2%), along with high frequencies on the different components. Depression, anxiety and stress symptoms all revealed positive relationships with sleep quality and its components. Multiple regression analysis` were performed to test for impact, and revealed depression and anxiety had no significant predicted high PSQI scores as a model. However, stress on its own was a significant predictor for high PSQI scores in students.

Conclusions: These findings illustrate that poor sleep quality and its relationship with depression, anxiety and stress are concerningly high in Irish students, albeit stress was the highest and most significant predictor, meaning practitioners and professionals in colleges need to strategically implement more services for students with concerns of mental health and sleep problems.