COMMENTARY Sleep, Stress and Health: A Commentary Barbara A. Mullan * † Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Research Group, School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia Received 2 July 2014; Revised 14 July 2014; Accepted 17 July 2014 Keywords sleep; stress; health *Correspondence Barbara Mullan, Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Research Group, School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845, Australia. † Email: barbara.mullan@curtin.edu.au Published online 4 August 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/smi.2605 Poor sleep has bidirectional influences on health including obesity (Burt, Dube, Thibault, & Gruber, 2014; Gupta, Mueller, Chan, & Meininger, 2002) and diabetes (Perfect, Elkins, Lyle-Lahroud, & Posey, 2010). Most importantly, in the context of this Virtual Special Issue, adequate sleep predicts how individuals experience and cope with stress and its impact on health (Barber, Munz, Bagsby, & Powell, 2010; Benham, 2010). Together, this series of papers demonstrates that interest in links between sleep, stress and health is flourishing; however, they also highlight a number of challenges for future work– the need for greater justification when selecting measure- ment tools and interventions to translate the findings of the predictive studies reported here into practice. A wide diversity of populations have been studied— for example, undergraduate students (Bader, Bauer, Christen, & Schäfer, 2011; Barber & Munz, 2011; Barber et al., 2010; Benham, 2010; Gress-Smith, Roubinov, Andreotti, Compas, & Luecken, 2013), full-time employees (Barber & Jenkins, 2013; Pereira & Elfering, 2014; Pereira, Meier, & Elfering, 2013) and clinical populations including psychiatric outpatients (Schafer & Bader, 2013) and people with diabetes (Perfect et al., 2010). It is noteworthy that in all populations studied, important relationships between sleep, stress and health were found. This consistency suggests that sleep is an important area of research and that interventions to improve sleep are integral and, if successful, likely to have far-reaching positive implications. There is also a need for cross- population/context research to determine whether the predictors of poor sleep differ according to context, as this will inform the selection of relevant intervention targets. Students are known to suffer from poor sleep and sleep-hygiene behaviours (Todd & Mullan, 2013). The educational/academic setting also represents a conve- nience sample for recruitment, as is reflected here (e.g., Bader et al., 2011; Benham, 2010; Gress-Smith et al., 2013). Within this context, the link to stress has been confirmed using retrospective (Gress-Smith et al., 2013), cross-sectional (Benham, 2010) and experimental designs (Bader et al., 2011). For example, Gress-Smith et al. (2013) found that perceived stress mediated the relationship between childhood adversity and both insomnia and depres- sion. An equivalent relationship was found amongst psychiatric outpatients (Schafer & Bader, 2013). Bader et al. (2011) found that exposure to a stressful video led to poorer sleep, particularly if it activated memories of stressful life events. Regarding health, Benham (2010) found that sleep variables increased the prediction of physical symptoms by 17–26% over and above the influence of stress. The workplace was another commonly researched context here (Barber, Grawitch, & Munz, 2012; Barber & Munz, 2011; Pereira & Elfering, 2014; Pereira et al., 2013). Although the nature of the stress experienced by workers likely differs from the educational context, similarities were found. For example, workers who experienced workplace ostracism woke more fre- quently (Pereira et al., 2013), and sleep quality mediated the relationship between work-related stress and somatic health complaints (Pereira & Elfering, 2014). Finally, Barber and Jenkins (2013) found that the relationship between stress and sleep was modified by the ability to set boundaries around work-related ICT use at home, such that strong boundaries were associated with more sleep-related benefits. Indeed, the role of technology in sleep outcomes is an impor- tant question in both the educational/academic and occupational contexts. 433 Stress and Health 30: 433–435 (2014) © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.