One type of sleep can tell you a lot about a person

Everyone knows that sleep is important, but most studies usually focus only on its duration and associate it with one result, for example, a bad mood. Canadian scientists Oror Perrault and Valeria Kebets decided to look at the problem more broadly. They used sophisticated analysis to identify the relationships between multiple sleep characteristics and individual differences in a person’s health, mindset, and lifestyle.

For this purpose, the researchers took data on 770 young people from the Human Connectome Project. This array of information contained not only detailed information about each participant’s sleep, but also the results of brain scans, as well as a large amount of data on psychological and physical health. Thanks to this comprehensive approach, connections that had previously gone unnoticed were discovered.

As a result, five distinct “sleep profiles” were identified. The first profile, which could be called “poor sleep overall,” was directly linked to poorer mental health outcomes.: high anxiety, stress, and depression. The second profile, called “steady sleep,” was different in that people, even when reporting sleep problems, did not have severe psychological difficulties, especially with attention.

The other three profiles turned out to be more specific. For example, one of them was almost completely determined by the duration of sleep: short sleep in this profile was invariably associated with deterioration of cognitive functions, that is, problems with thinking. These results clearly show that sleep is not a one—dimensional phenomenon, but a complex mosaic of duration, interruptions, and other factors.

Interestingly, each of these five profiles turned out to be associated with a unique organization of brain networks. In people with the first profile, that is, with general poor sleep and poor psychology, there was a high connection between subcortical areas and networks responsible for attention and movement. This suggests that the features of our sleep are reflected not only in behavior and health, but also in the very wiring of the brain.

The authors of the study note that different aspects of sleep can be related, but still remain separate areas with their own specific links to mental health and lifestyle. This highlights how important it is to consider the full picture of a person’s sleep.