RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANTICIPATED STRESS AND INDIVIDUALS’ HEALTH-RELATED BEHAVIORS

Prior work in assessing the relationship between stress and health behaviors has identified the complex and multi-directional nature of these relationships. However, minimal work has assessed the possible relationships between stress anticipation and health behaviors such as diet, physical activity, and sleep outcomes in individuals. This work seeks to address this gap by conducting a daily diary study assessing within-person associations between stress anticipation and health behaviors over the course of a week. We hypothesized that daily stress anticipation would be negatively associated with dietary scores, physical activity engagement reports, sleep quality, and sleep duration while being positively correlated with sleep disturbance. We examined bidirectional associations: stress anticipation that morning to health behavior that day as well as prior day’s health behavior to the subsequent morning’s stress anticipation reports. Participants (N = 136) were college students who participated in a seven-day daily diary study; each morning they completed a morning survey upon waking and an evening survey before they went to bed. Results indicated that the previous night’s sleep disturbance was related to next morning stress anticipation. On days when participants reported greater than their average sleep disturbance the previous night, they were more likely to report greater stress anticipation than on days when they reported less sleep disturbances (γ = .1356, 95% CI [.02334 – .2479], p = .018). There were no significant within-person associations between stress anticipation and diet, physical activity, or sleep the following night. These results highlight the importance of further evaluating the possible role of stress anticipation in health-related behaviors among young adults.