The interaction of emotion regulation and sleep quality: does social media usage duration play a role?

The bidirectional association of emotion regulation with sleep quality has received increased attention in recent years. In this research, we investigated the correlation between the habitual use of different emotion regulation strategies (i.e., Expressive Suppression and Cognitive Reappraisal) and different components of sleep quality. Considering that previous research revealed that using social media could influence emotion regulation and sleep quality in different ways, we controlled for the effect of social media usage duration on the interplay of emotion regulation strategies and sleep quality components. Our results showed that the habitual use of Cognitive Reappraisal was associated with improved daytime functioning; while, the tendency to use Expressive Suppression in various situations was associated with shorter sleep duration. Our findings supported the view that the habitual use of Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression have different well-being consequences. We also observed that using any of the strategies was negatively correlated with more frequent use of sleeping medications. Additionally, we did not observe any correlation between social media usage duration and other variables. We proposed that understanding the role of social media usage on the interplay between sleep quality and emotion regulation requires a comprehensive evaluation of individual differences in using social media as well as a careful analysis of the social media platforms’ characteristics.