Covid-19 Pandemic: A Barrier on College Students' Path to Falling Asleep?

Keywords

sleep - insomnia - pandemic - COVID-19 - college students

Introduction: The pandemic has reduced face-to-face routines, increasing the time available for sleep. However, concerns about the pandemic context could contribute to chronic stress and interfere with sleep.

Aim: To investigate the college students' perception of sleep impairment due to concerns about COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Study performed in 2021 with 825 Brazilian college students, of both sexes, between 18 and 58 years old. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee under registration: 36741020.3.0000.5208. An electronic form was used, in which participants responded to the statement: “Due to concern about the COVID-19 situation, I have sleep problems.” College students were grouped into groups according to the answer: “never” (NV), “rarely” (RR), “sometimes” (ST), “often” (OF) or very often” (VO). The form also had other questions for characterizing the groups, such as age, gender, academic semester, class format, income, COVID-19 diagnosis, COVID-19 vaccination, and time to fall asleep (in minutes). The Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test was applied, as well as the Kruskal-Wallis test, followed by Dunn's post-hoc test to compare the variables between the groups, considering p < 0.05.

Results: There was a predominance of females (69.6%), 23.0 ± 4.2 years old and 5.4 ± 2.9 academic semesters. Most were in emergency remote classes (69.7%) followed by remote + face-to-face classes (20.8%). Only 37.1% never had sleep problems due to concern about COVID-19; 49.4% had such problems rarely or sometimes; and 13.5% presented frequently or very frequently. There was no difference between the groups in terms of age and academic semester (p > 0.05). However, when analyzing the time to sleep onset, it was found that college students in the NV group (31.4min ± 109.3min) needed less time to fall asleep than the other groups (p < 0.001). Furthermore, the OF (60.1min ± 67.4min; p < 0.05) and VO (74.9min ± 87.8min; p < 0.01) groups took longer to fall asleep than the RR group (40.2min ± .49.4min).

Conclusions: Concerns about the COVID-19 context led to sleep impairments for most college students at least sometime until the second year of the pandemic. The college students’ perception about the pandemic, despite being heterogeneous, was associated with the time spent falling asleep.

Acknowledgment:

This study was supported in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Finance Code 001.

No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).

Publication History

Article published online:
15 June 2023