Your sleep type could explain your mood and attention span

Sleep does not look the same for everyone. In a new study scientists grouped young adults into five sleep profiles and showed that each one lines up with different health measures and brain wiring.

The team analyzed 770 people using surveys about sleep, resting brain scans, and a wide set of mental and physical measures. They tested how multiple sleep traits connect with the rest of life instead of picking one number at a time.

Sleep types have many sides

The work was led by Aurore Perrault at Concordia University (CU). She and colleagues show that sleep is a bundle of parts, not a single score.

Sleep health has several dimensions, including duration, regularity, timing, satisfaction, and alertness. These pieces matter because each one can track with different outcomes.

The researchers used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, a medical questionnaire that measures how well a person sleeps over the course of a month, to score seven parts of sleep, along with 118 measures of mood, thinking, habits, and health.

The goal was to see how those pieces move together across biology, behavior, and social life, a biopsychosocial.

Five unique sleep types

“We uncovered five profiles, including two profiles reflecting general psychopathology, a broad measure of mental and emotional problems, associated with either reports of general poor sleep or an absence of sleep complaints,” wrote Perrault.

One of those two profiles showed worse mood and stress paired with broad sleep complaints, while the other showed daytime impairment without poor sleep reports.

A third profile centered on use of sleep aids paired with higher social satisfaction and weaker visual memory. A fourth centered on short sleep and lower cognitive accuracy, while a fifth reflected more fragmented sleep tied to anxiety markers and higher alcohol and cigarette use.

“Sleep is essential for optimal functioning and health,” wrote Perrault. The profiles highlight that different sleep problems travel with different patterns in thinking and well being rather than a single universal pathway.

How the brain wiring differs

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a scanning method that tracks blood flow to show brain activity.

The team used fMRI to map resting-state functional connectivity, a measure of how brain regions naturally communicate when a person is not performing a task. Each sleep profile came with a distinct pattern of network coupling.

In the poor sleep plus psychopathology profile, subcortical regions – the deep structures of the brain that control emotion and motivation – showed stronger connections with the somatomotor network. This network is responsible for movement and body awareness.

These regions also coupled more closely with attention systems, a pattern suggesting higher baseline arousal.

In contrast, the sleep resilience profile showed a different balance between attention and control networks.

Changes in systems for self focus can help explain the mental health links. In depression, stronger coupling within the default mode network, a brain network active during daydreaming and inward thought, has been tied to rumination connecting self-referential brain activity to repetitive negative thinking.

Why sleep types help with care

Clinicians often ask how many hours you sleep and stop there. These findings argue that intake should note which aspects are off and how they interact with symptoms and daily function.

Short sleep links to slower reaction times and lower accuracy across multiple tasks. Effects appear across attention, working memory, processing speed, and reasoning.

Quality also matters. Objective measures such as efficiency and awakenings often line up more strongly with psychiatric diagnoses than total hours. This was shown in a UK Biobank analysis that compared ten accelerometer derived sleep features with lifetime diagnoses and genetic risk.

How scientists studied sleep

Participants came from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) young adult dataset, a large collection of brain images and behavioral data from volunteers, which pairs high quality brain scans with detailed life measures. That resource provides enough breadth to connect sleep traits to networks across the brain.

The sample included adults aged 22 to 36 and provided resting fMRI, multiple cognitive tests, and month long sleep reports.

The team used canonical correlation analysis, a statistical technique that finds relationships between two complex data sets, to uncover shared structure without assuming one variable causes another.

More research on sleep types

Three profiles built on single sleep dimensions were less stable in cross checks. That means they may mark narrower subgroups or be more sensitive to sampling and should be tested in broader populations.

Sleep timing and regularity were not modeled here, even though they are core parts of modern sleep health ideas and tools. Adding week-long device measures could help capture those rhythms.

Sex differences appeared most clearly within the disturbance profile, which tracked worse language and working memory performance along with higher anxiety markers. That pattern suggests biology and context both shape how sleep problems present and who is most affected.

Ultimately, sleep profiles can guide care toward specific targets. One person might need help with time in bed, while another needs help with fragmented sleep that fuels daytime mood shifts.

Brain networks give another handle to track progress. If a profile shifts, connectivity patterns may shift as well, offering objective markers to complement symptom reports.

The study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.

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