A new study from Villanova University finds that young adults high in neuroticism report sleeping less, even though a wrist-worn sleep monitor shows no corresponding drop in actual sleep. The research, published in Personality and Individual Differences, compared self-reported sleep with actigraphy in the same group of participants to explore this discrepancy.
Neuroticism, a trait linked to a propensity for negative emotions such as worry and distress, has long been associated with shorter sleep in self-reports. By contrast, prior work using actigraphy—an objective sleep estimate based on movement—has often failed to reproduce the same link. The new study sought to understand why these two approaches yield different pictures of sleep duration.
In total, 134 undergraduate students with no diagnosed sleep disorders participated. The group averaged around 19 years of age and comprised 95 women. Each participant wore a wrist actigraph for five nights, including two weekend nights, while completing questionnaires about personality, sleep, and symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Sleep was assessed in two self-report ways for the preceding month: participants were asked to estimate how many hours they usually slept, and the researchers also calculated sleep duration from each person’s usual bedtime, wake time, and time taken to fall asleep.
The findings showed that higher neuroticism was linked to shorter sleep on both self-report measures but not to actigraphy-estimated sleep. The observed effect was modest: roughly 15 to 20 minutes less sleep for each one-point rise on a five-point neuroticism scale. This association persisted even after adjusting for actigraphy estimates, demographics, body mass index, symptoms of depression and anxiety, night-to-night sleep regularity, and other personality traits.
Average sleep estimates illustrated the measurement divergence. Direct self-report yielded 6.74 hours of sleep, the actigraph recorded 6.70 hours, and the calculated self-report estimate stood higher at 7.40 hours. People higher in neuroticism tended to underestimate their sleep on the direct question and to overestimate it less on the calculated measure.
While depressive and anxious symptoms were closely related to neuroticism, they were not themselves associated with sleep duration nor with the self-reported sleep measures, and adjusting for them did not weaken the neuroticism–sleep link. The researchers therefore suggest that the trait, rather than transient distress, plays a central role in the observed pattern.
The authors conclude that neuroticism appears more strongly connected with how individuals perceive, recall, and report their sleep duration than with sleep that actigraphy would identify. They speculate that higher neuroticism might lead to more negative interpretations of sleep or that pre-sleep worry could make falling asleep feel slower, though these ideas remain speculative as recall errors or reporting biases were not directly measured.
Other possible explanations include the possibility that people high in neuroticism spend more time lying still while awake, which actigraphy may wrongly classify as sleep. The authors also acknowledge that both neuroticism and habitual sleep were self-reported, which could reflect shared reporting tendencies. Limitations noted include the five-night actigraphy window, the one-month self-report window, and the sample being drawn from a single private university with a largely female cohort of college students.
The study, authored by Derick M. DeCamp and Elizabeth J. Pantesco, is titled “Neuroticism is associated with self-reported, but not actigraphy-assessed, sleep duration.”
