The interplay among sleep patterns, social habits, and environmental cues: insights from the Spanish population and implications for aligning daily rhythms.

Introduction: The interplay among sleep patterns, social habits and environmental cues is becoming increasingly more important for public health and wellbeing due to its connection to circadian desynchronization. This paper explores said connections in Spain (which has an official and solar time mismatch), introducing the "Three Times Score" ‒which is based on questions widely used in the field‒ as a complementary tool for exploring the interplay of daily rhythms. Methods: The questionnaire covers sleep-related habits, social time, and environmental time. The study includes 9,947 participants (34.89 ± 12.15 y/o, mean ± SD; 5,561 women) from different Spanish regions. Sleep parameters were obtained for work and free days, as well as a modified version of the sleep-corrected midsleep on free days (MBFbc) and a parameter similar to social jet lag, both derived from bed time rather than sleep time. A number of indexes were computed to compare bed and work-related habits, together with natural light/dark cycle, along with the Three Times Score. Mixed-effect regression analysis was used to test whether the biological, social and environmental factors included in the study significantly predicted the sleep-related parameters: bedtime, wake-up time, time in bed and mid-bedtime. Results and discussion: Temporal differences were found between work and free days, with waking-up occurring 2 h earlier on work days (7:10 ± 0:01) than on free days (9:15 ± 0:01). Bed times were 1 h earlier on work days (23:46 ± 0:01) than on free days (00:45 ± 0:01), whereas time in bed was over 1 h shorter on work (7 h 23 min)