Mindful Awareness Practices vs. Sleep Education: Improving Sleep Quality During the Transition to College

Summary

Sleep disturbance has a range of negative effects on psychosocial and biological processes important for academic and social success as well as mental and physical health among adolescents and young adults. Limited, inconsistent, and poor quality sleep lead to anxiety, depressive feelings, loneliness, and fatigue over time. These symptoms, in turn, interfere with the ability to get a good night's rest. Sleep disruption can also upregulate inflammatory processes during the years of adolescence and young adulthood in ways that can create risk for the development of chronic health conditions (e.g., diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease) in later adulthood. Sleep, however, is also a modifiable health behavior, leading many institutions to embark upon efforts to improve the sleep of their students. The challenge is to identify programs and interventions that can simultaneously improve sleep, be delivered at scale, and be easily completed by students. UCLA has developed and validated a group-based mindfulness intervention, Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPs), that has demonstrated beneficial effects on sleep in adults and may offer a promising, scalable approach for reducing sleep disturbance and improving associated psychological and biological outcomes in college students. However, this approach requires validation in this population relative to sleep education programs, which increasingly dominate the college landscape. To address this important public health problem, the investigators propose to conduct a single site, two-arm, parallel group randomized controlled trial to test the efficacy of the validated, group-based, six-week MAPs intervention vs. sleep education, an active time and attention matched control condition, for first and second year undergraduate students who report poor sleep at this critical transition year. The investigators are aiming to enroll approximately 240 participants. Participants will complete questionnaires, provide blood samples for immune analysis and will be provided with wrist actigraphs to wear for 7 days, in order to collect objective measurements of sleep at pre- and post-intervention visits, and at a 3-month follow-up visit. Additional follow-up assessments will take place at 6-month, and 12-month post-intervention to evaluate persistence of effects.

Description

Eligibility

Age range

18–22 years

Sex

All

Healthy volunteers

Yes

Interventions

• Behavioral
  Mindfulness Meditation

  The mindful awareness practices (MAPS) for Sleep intervention is based on an institutional program developed by the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at UCLA. This intervention includes educational and behavioral content related to sleep, including the importance of regularity of sleep schedules, minimizing noise and light, and reducing caffeine use later in the day. Each session provides structured training and exercises in mindfulness, including formal meditation practices and strategies for the daily informal use of mindfulness, as well as opportunity for questions and group discussion. Home practice is a key component of MAPs and is particularly important for addressing sleep disturbance. Participants will be instructed to practice mindfulness techniques on a daily basis, beginning with five minutes and increasing to 20 minutes, with practice prior to bedtime, and to practice at night if they awake and cannot return to sleep.

• Behavioral
  Sleep Education

  The Sleep Education intervention provides education and behavioral content based on the National Institutes of Health and National Sleep Foundation tips for better sleep (e.g., changing poor sleep habits and establishing a bedtime routine). Each session provides didactic instruction, review of behavioral techniques, and opportunity for questions. Homework includes practicing sleep hygiene and weekly reading. Key components of the intervention include information about sleep biology, characteristics of healthy and unhealthy sleep, sleep problems, stress biology and stress reduction, self-monitoring of sleep behavior, relaxation methods for improving sleep, and weekly behavioral sleep hygiene strategies.

Location