Sleep, loneliness linked with high-risk drinking in college students

Key takeaways:

• During COVID-19, college students reported sleeping more, increased insomnia symptoms.
• Sleep and loneliness are linked with problematic drinking in students with/without substance use disorder.

INDIANAPOLIS — Sleep duration, latencies and loneliness were associated with problematic drinking among college students with and without substance use disorder in 2020.

In a poster presented at SLEEP 2023, Caleb Cutrer, a student in the department of psychology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, told Healio his research aimed to determine whether sleep factors and loneliness had an impact on alcohol use among college students before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cutrer and J. Roxanne Prichard, PhD, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the university, examined the psychological and behavioral predictors of high-risk drinking using the fall 2019 and fall 2020 American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment III. The sample included responses from 50,052 students from post-secondary schools in the U.S. Researchers also compared measures of sleep, loneliness and alcohol use.

Cutrer and Prichard considered the following variables: ASSIST SSIS alcohol use score, Kessler 6 nonspecific psychological distress scale, UCLA 3-item loneliness scale and various measures of sleep, including sleep duration, sleep latency and sleep difficulties.

Their findings revealed that compared with 2019, students in 2020 reported lower levels of high-risk drinking, increased difficulty falling asleep and somewhat longer sleep duration during weeknights. Among students with a substance use disorder diagnosis, problems with sleep initiation were significantly higher, as well as subjective sleep difficulties and increased levels of loneliness compared with their peers without substance use disorder in 2019 and 2020. However, the loneliness score averages were lower in 2020 among those with a substance use disorder, but not among those without.

“We thought maybe this was due to being around family if you left college and went back home because you had to, but there could be a million explanations for that,” Cutrer told Healio. “Loneliness is definitely a big factor in the pathology that goes along with substance use disorder, so that was probably the most unexpected finding.”

Across both years, self-reported sleep difficulties were linked with significantly more negative drinking outcomes among respondents, according to Cutrer. These included suicidal thinking (2.4% of drinkers), unprotected sex (11.6% of drinkers), trouble with police (1% of drinkers) and blacking out while drinking (10.9% of drinkers).

“Sleep and loneliness and mental distress — to a certain degree — seemed to, out of all the variables we looked at, have the most impact on problematic drinking and high-risk drinking,” Cutrer said. “Then, when the pandemic gets into the mix, that seemed to heighten those risks.”