Sleep Moderates Improvements in Mental Health Outcomes in Youth: Building Resilience for Healthy Kids.

Purpose: To examine the role of sleep in a school-based resiliency intervention.

Design: Single group feasibility study. Setting: Urban middle school. Subjects: Sixth grade students. Intervention: A total of 285, 11-12-year-old students (70% White, 18% Hispanic, 55% female) participated in the six-week 1:1 Healthy Kids intervention. Youth (n = 248) completed electronic surveys at pre-post the 6-week study assessing mental health parameters and self-reported bed and wake time. Measures: Students were categorized as having insufficient sleep opportunity if they reported time in bed of <9 hours per night. Analysis: General linear models examined differences between groups for each mental health parameters pre-post-study.

Results: A third of participants (28%) were classified as having insufficient sleep opportunity. Youth with insufficient sleep were more often Hispanic (27% vs 16%; P < .001) and were more often classified with both mild to severe depression and anxiety symptoms (55% vs 35%; P = .004). The health coaching intervention was found to have a significant improvement on overall resilience and self-efficacy only among students who reported sufficient sleep, while no significant intervention effect was found for those students who reported insufficient sleep.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that youth with poor sleep health may not benefit from school-based resiliency interventions.