Efficacy of a Novel Sleep Intervention in Short Sleepers

Plain-language summary

Approximately 1/3 of Americans sleep ≤6h per night, an amount that has been deemed sub-optimal by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society, the National Sleep Foundation, American Thoracic Society, and the American Heart Association. These consensus statements echo findings from many reviews on this topic. This is alarming, given epidemiologic and experimental research showing that reduced sleep time is associated with a variety of negative health outcomes including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. Different people may need different amounts of sleep. And some people may not be able to make large changes to their sleep schedule all at once. Many individuals have situational constraints that change over time. As such, short sleep represents an unmet public health problem. There are, however, no empirically supported interventions for insufficient sleep. The proposed study addresses this critical gap by evaluating the efficacy of a novel intervention that is theoretically grounded, feasible, and has positive impacts on sleep duration. The intervention in the proposed study is by design self-correcting, individually-tailored, and not dependent on unknown individual sleep needs. It can adapt to any schedule and situation and can adapt to changes in a person's sleep schedule. The main goal of this study is to evaluate whether a manually determined sleep extension intervention is effective at improving sleep and related outcomes among adults who find it difficult to get enough sleep.

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