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Study: Stress, depression may be links to insomnia, drinking
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: May 5, 2025
A new Ohio State University-led study examines the relationship between insomnia and heavy drinking and how stress and depression may affect either activity.
The research, which functioned on the premise that perceived stress and depression are factors in the relationship between the two conditions, found the influence of either depends upon which condition––insomnia or alcohol abuse––existed first, a news release detailed.
“We were most interested in how insomnia leads to drinking, and we found that seems to occur primarily through stress,” said Jessica Weafer, a psychiatry and behavioral health associate professor at Ohio State. “But when we switched pathways, it appeared that drinking primarily led to insomnia through depression.”
Weafer, the senior author of the study, said identifying the mediating factors of each of the conditions can have important treatment implications.
“If people who have insomnia are experiencing a lot of stress, then if we can target the stress, that might reduce the likelihood that their insomnia would lead to heavy drinking,” she continued. “That’s the long-term ideal, or hope, that this work could have an impact on treatment.”
Published recently in the journal Alcohol, the research compiled and reviewed the results of a questionnaire completed by 405 volunteers.
According to the release, study participants were part of a larger project testing the effectiveness of a digital insomnia intervention for people with poor sleep who are heavy drinkers.
In their analysis of the data with a range of statistical models, researchers found many ways stress and depression influence the relationship between insomnia and hazardous drinking.
“If you look at stress and depression separately, we find there is an indirect relationship between insomnia and drinking as well as drinking and insomnia––meaning a good chunk of the relationship between insomnia and drinking can be explained through perceived stress or depression,” said the first study author, Justin Verlinden, a cognitive neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. “When you put both stress and depression in the same models, that’s where we get unique findings, even though there are a lot of shared characteristics between stress and depression.”
A model of insomnia predicting heavy use of alcohol showed that the characteristics of stress––beyond any symptoms shared with depression––better described the relationship, the release noted. In a model in which drinking predicts the onset of insomnia, symptoms of depression that aren’t shared with stress better explained the link.
“That finding was very surprising, but showed the benefit of looking at both stress and depression in the same model, to see how those pathways might differ depending on what the directionality is,” Weafer said.
Researchers noted that their findings represented a snapshot rather than an explanation of the progression of the link between the two conditions.
Weafer said the team continues to collect a final dataset to track insomnia, stress and depression during a 12-month period to get a better idea of the connected pathways.
The research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the University of Kentucky.
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