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Ricerche di Psicologia/Psychological Research Journal - Open Access

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The Role of Rumination and Stress in Women’s Sleep: Evidence from a Diary Study

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/rip2025oa22753
Inviata
8 maggio 2026
Pubblicato
03-08-2026

Abstract

Women are recognized to report poorer sleep compared to man, with a wide-ranging consequence for their physical and mental health. Recently, research has started to focus on psychological factors to account for such gender-dependent disparities. Preliminary evidence indicates that poor sleep is often related to stress and use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as rumination. However, since prior research has mainly examined the association of sleep quality with either stress or rumination, little is known about their potential combined effect. In this one-week diary study, we investigated how daily- and trait-levels of stress and rumination interact to predict sleep quality in 166 healthy women.

The results from multilevel modeling revealed a significant negative association between daily pre-sleep rumination and sleep quality. By contrast, daily stress was not significantly associated with sleep quality, nor did its interaction with pre-sleep rumination. At the trait level, perceived stress and its interaction with brooding rumination were significantly associated with poor sleep quality.

Overall, our findings highlight the importance of diary study designs for deepening our understanding of how stress and rumination are jointly associated with sleep in women. More broadly, the present study contributes to feminist scholarship on health by emphasizing the need to address the gendered dimensions of psychological processes that affect health outcomes.

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