Exploring the underlying mechanisms linking mobile phone addiction to impaired sleep in Chinese college students

Adequate sleep is the basic guarantee for college students to complete daily study tasks and a normal life. The quality of sleep is directly related to the physical and mental health of college students, schools and society should pay attention to the sleep problems of college students. In order to explore the relationship between mobile phone addiction and sleep quality of college students and the mediating roles of social anxiety and physical activity between the two, this study used the Mobile Phone Addiction Scale, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Scale, the Physical Activity Scale, and the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents to investigate and analyze the data from 3781 college students. This study was conducted by the Declaration of Helsinki and the Guidelines for the Construction of Ethical Review Committees for Clinical Research Involving Human Subjects (China, 2023). All experimental protocols of this study were approved the Henan University Institutional Review Board (IRB), and written informed consent was obtained from all participants before participation in the study. The results show that mobile phone addiction significantly and positively predicts sleep quality of college students.Social anxiety and physical activity, respectively, independently play mediating roles between mobile phone addiction and sleep quality of college students, and the competitive mediation are significant and the effect sizes are 242.6% and 21.5%, respectively. Social anxiety and physical activity play chain mediating roles between mobile phone addiction and sleep quality of college students, and the competitive mediation is significant and the effect size is 6.1%. This study helps to clarify the mechanism of mobile phone addiction on sleep quality and provides a new theoretical perspective to enhance and optimize the sleep quality of adolescents.