The Role of Sleep and Metacognition in Linking Stress to Self-Hate: A Dual- Analytic Study in University Students

Background Stress-related mental health problems are highly prevalent among university students, yet the mechanisms through which stress gives rise to distinct affective outcomes remain poorly understood. Sleep disturbance represents a core transdiagnostic pathway through which stress may impair emotional functioning; however, the sequential roles of sleep quality and daytime sleepiness, as well as their interaction with metacognitive processes, remain unclear. Moreover, reliance on single analytic approaches may obscure outcome-specific vulnerabilities within the stress–sleep–mental health system. Methods A total of 1,374 university students completed validated measures assessing perceived stress, sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, anhedonia, self-hate, and metacognition. We applied a dual-analytic framework that integrated regression-based chain and moderated mediation models with a Discrete Bayesian Network (DBN) to examine both linear associations and probabilistic dependencies among variables. Results Perceived stress exerted significant indirect effects on both anhedonia and self-hate through poorer sleep quality and increased daytime sleepiness, with a markedly stronger indirect pathway for self-hate. Daytime sleepiness showed a substantially larger effect on self-hate than on anhedonia, and metacognition significantly moderated the association between sleepiness and self-hate, but not anhedonia. DBN analyses converged with regression findings, indicating that self-hate was probabilistically more sensitive than anhedonia to stress- and sleep-related disruptions. Conclusions These findings identify self-hate as a particularly sleep- and cognition-sensitive outcome within the stress–sleep–mental health network. Integrating regression and Bayesian approaches clarifies distinct vulnerability pathways and highlights sleep-focused, cognition-informed interventions as promising targets for stress-related mental health problems in young adults.