Having poor sleep is common, but how it feels for every person is different. Some may lie awake ruminating at 3 a.m., while others may wake up repeatedly throughout the night.
Recent research suggests that these aren’t just variations of “bad sleep”; they are distinct profiles, each leaving a different signature on the brain and body.
“Your sleep is not the same as your neighbor’s, and neither are the impacts on your health and functioning,” Aurore Perrault, a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and coauthor of the study, told The Epoch Times.
The 5 Sleep Profiles
The study, published in PLOS Biology, identified five distinct sleep patterns in healthy adults, each associated with unique brain activity, cognitive effects, and health risks. The findings challenge the conventional view of sleep as simply “good” or “bad.”
Researchers analyzed data from 770 healthy young adults using brain scans and detailed questionnaires about sleep habits, health, and lifestyle over the previous month.
Most of the relationship between sleep and health in the study, about 88 percent, was explained by a single dominant pattern linking poor sleep with worse mental health. The second, third, fourth, and fifth patterns accounted for smaller shares: 4 percent, 3 percent, 2 percent, and 1 percent, respectively.
Profile 1: The Ruminators
This most dominant pattern linked general sleep disturbances—taking a long time to fall asleep, frequent night wakings, and daytime fatigue—with poorer mental health. These people showed higher rates of depression, anxiety, physical stress symptoms, and difficulty managing negative emotions such as fear, anger, and frustration.
Profile 2: The Resilient Distressed
Characteristics of this profile include having no sleep problems except difficulty focusing during the day. This group also tended to experience stress and high psychological distress and struggled with negative emotions similar to those in profile one.
Profile 3: The Medicated Sleepers
This group used sleeping pills. A characteristic of sleeping pill users is that they tend to perform worse on tasks testing visual memory and emotion recognition, suggesting that medications may have subtle cognitive trade-offs. However, sleeping pill users also tend to have greater satisfaction with social relationships.
Profile 4: The Sleep-Deprived
Getting fewer than six to seven hours of sleep nightly, these short sleepers showed slower thinking across multiple cognitive domains, including reading and responding to emotions, resisting impulsive choices, processing language, solving new problems, and interpreting social cues.
Profile 5: The Fragmented Sleepers
Marked by repeated awakenings from pain, temperature changes, breathing issues, or bathroom trips, this group showed higher rates of substance use, irritability, and poorer mental health overall.
Different Sleep Problems, Different Brain Patterns
Each sleep profile came with its own brain signature.
“We didn’t expect to find distinct brain patterns in such a young and healthy sample,” Perrault said. “It suggests that sleep experiences are reflected not just in health and behavior, but also in the brain’s wiring and activity.”
Profiles one and two were both characterized by heightened activity in the brain networks that keep people awake and alert, a sign of hyperarousal often linked to stress. Yet they diverged in crucial ways.
In profile one, the balance between the brain’s internal network—active during self-focused thought, daydreaming, and rumination—and its external attention network broke down. The brain’s “internal chatter” did not quiet when it should, trapping people in repetitive thought loops.
Profile two, on the other hand, showed the same heightened arousal in its alertness networks but without the excessive rumination, which may help preserve sleep.
Profile three showed disruptions in visual, memory, and emotional-processing networks. The researchers suggested that this reflects the sedating effects of sleep medications, which can subtly interfere with how the brain integrates perception and emotional cues.
Profile four looked like a brain running on sleep debt, with signs that it was working overtime to stay functional.
Profile five showed weaker communication between brain regions responsible for attention, movement, and body awareness, likely due to sleep constantly being interrupted.
Why These Findings Matter
Disrupted sleep doesn’t just leave people tired; it can throw off the brain systems that regulate emotions and stress response.
Perrault noted that the findings came from healthy young adults with no diagnosed disorders, suggesting that sleep-related brain changes affect everyone, not just those with clinical conditions.
She said the study shows the importance of assessing the whole picture of a person’s sleep, including its quality, timing, and continuity, to help clinicians make more accurate evaluations and guide treatment.
Most sleep interventions, whether medication-based or behavioral, still treat poor sleep as a single problem rather than addressing specific difficulties, Perrault said. While some treatments target particular issues—melatonin for short-term trouble falling asleep or rocking beds for sleep fragmentation—many programs remain too general.
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, may help people who struggle to quiet their minds, while those who experience fragmented sleep may often have underlying issues such as sleep apnea or nighttime environmental factors that need to be addressed. In general, maintaining good sleep hygiene—for instance, keeping consistent bed and wake times and limiting caffeine and sugar for at least two hours before bed—can help improve sleep quality and duration.
It’s important to not wait until sleep issues become severe. Perrault advised people to see their doctor or ask for a referral to a sleep clinic at the first sign of sleep problems, particularly if they feel unusually tired during the day or have trouble functioning.
“The issue isn’t always about duration but about quality,” she said.
