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Category: Project

Description: Risks of insufficient sleep include depression, diabetes, obesity, and accidents. Despite these risks being widely publicised, up to 40% of adults regularly fail to procure their recommended 7 to 9 hours per night. It has recently been suggested that in many cases, this may be due to sleep procrastination: people postpone the time at which they go to bed, and/or having gone to bed, they postpone going to sleep. Research has indicated that these behaviours may be related to low self-regulation, chronotype, or stress. Sleep intentions have not been found to predict sleep duration or quality. In other health behaviours, however, it has been shown that intentions can fluctuate over time, and that intention stability can moderate the relationship between intention and behaviour. Alternatively, health behaviour might be related more to expectation than intention. These relationships have not yet been investigated in sleep. In this study, an EMA design will be used to investigate the moderating effects of self-regulation, chronotype, stress, and intention stability. In addition, expectation and intention will be compared as predictors of bedtimes and sleep times, sleep duration and sleep quality.