Social-ecological model of sleep health

Sleep exists at the interface of upstream social, biological, environmental, and behavioral influences and downstream consequences that cut across many areas of physical and mental health, as well as longevity/mortality. Conceptualizing this interface may be helpful in understanding the important role of sleep in health and society, and it may also be helpful in conceptualizing intervention strategies for sleep health. This chapter presents and describes the Social-Ecological Model of Sleep Health, which was originally developed in 2010 and has since been updated and refined. The chapter builds a version of the model conceptually, resulting in a fully-articulated description of how sleep impacts health, and how sleep is impacted by a system of nested constructs at the individual, social, and societal levels. Individual-level factors may directly influence sleep, but these are embedded in the context of social factors, and these also exist embedded within the context of societal factors.