Researchers used brain scans and questionnaires to analyze 770 healthy young adults and found four distinct groups of poor sleepers—people that take a long time to fall asleep, wake up frequently, and feel tired in the day.
Profile 1: The Ruminators
The most dominant pattern—at 88 percent—linked general sleep disturbances with poorer mental health. These people showed higher rates of depression, anxiety, physical stress symptoms, and difficulty managing negative emotions such as fear, anger, and frustration.
Profile 2: The Resilient Distressed
These people have no sleep problems except difficulty focusing during the day. This group also tended to experience stress and high psychological distress and struggled with negative emotions similar to those in Profile 1.
Profile 3: The Medicated Sleepers
This group used sleeping pills. A characteristic of sleeping pill users is that they tend to perform worse on tasks testing visual memory and emotion recognition—suggesting medications may have subtle cognitive trade-offs.
Profile 4: The Sleep-Deprived
Getting fewer than six to seven hours nightly, these short sleepers showed slower thinking across multiple cognitive domains, including reading and responding to emotions, resisting impulsive choices, processing language, solving new problems, and interpreting social cues.
Profile 5: The Fragmented Sleepers
Marked by repeated awakenings from pain, temperature changes, breathing issues, or bathroom trips, this group showed higher rates of substance use, irritability, and poorer mental health overall. (More)