Background: Findings from primarily cross-sectional studies have linked more extensive social media use to poorer sleep and affective wellbeing among adolescents and young adults. This study examined bedtime social media use, sleep, and affective wellbeing, using an experience sampling methodology with the aim of establishing a day-today temporal link between the variables. The study hypothesized a positive association between increased bedtime social media use and lower affective wellbeing the following day, mediated by poorer sleep. Methods: Using a smartphone application, 101 undergraduate students (M age = 19.70 years, SD = 1.09 years), completed daily questionnaires assessing the previous night's bedtime social media use and sleep duration and satisfaction (one measurement per day, questionnaire sent at 08:00), and momentary affective wellbeing (five measurements per day, at randomly varying times between 08:00 and 22:00 on weekdays and 10:00 and 22:00 on weekends), for 14 consecutive days. Objective assessments of total sleep time and sleep efficiency were obtained via wrist-worn actigraphs. By means of separate multilevel models, it was tested whether increased bedtime social media use predicted poorer sleep the same night, whether poorer sleep was predictive of positive and negative affect the following day, and whether sleep mediated the relationship between social media use and affective wellbeing. Results: Increased bedtime social media use was not associated with poorer sleep the same night. Apart from subjective sleep satisfaction, no other sleep variable (i.e., subjective sleep duration, objective total sleep time and objective sleep efficiency) predicted positive or negative affect the following day. Conclusions: This study found that bedtime social media use is not detrimental to the sleep and affective wellbeing of healthy young adults. However, it is possible that bedtime social media use may be harmful to the sleep of vulnerable individuals.

People differ in their sleep timings that are often referred to as a chronotype and can be operationalized as mid-sleep (midpoint between sleep onset and wake-up). The aims of the present studies were to examine intraindividual variability and longer-term temporal stability of mid-sleep on free and workdays, while also considering the effect of age. We used data from a 2-week experience sampling study of British university students (Study 1) and from a panel study of Estonian adults who filled in the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire twice up to 5 years apart (Study 2). Results of Study 1 showed that roughly 50% of the variance in daily mid-sleep scores across the 14-day period was attributed to intraindividual variability as indicated by the intraclass correlation coefficient. However, when the effect of free versus workdays was considered, the intraindividual variability in daily mid-sleep across 2 weeks was 0.71 the size of the interindividual variability. In Study 2, mid-sleep on free and workdays showed good levels of temporal stability—the retest correlations of mid-sleep on free and workdays were 0.66 and 0.58 when measured twice over a period of 0-1 to 5 years. The retest stability of mid-sleep scores on both free and workdays sharply increased from young adulthood and reached their peak when participants were in late 40 to early 50 years of age, indicating that age influences the stability of mid-sleep. Future long-term longitudinal studies are necessary to explore how age-related life circumstances and other possible factors may influence the intraindividual variability and temporal stability of mid-sleep.

Qualitative, cross-cultural research highlighted common concerns amongst young European women towards being responsible citizens in the face of their health and highlighted socio-cultural constraints to knowledge and resources. We highlight cross-cultural implications particularly between Western and Eastern European contexts.