Associations between self-selected pre-sleep music, state anxiety, and sleep quality: an exploratory study

Music listening is a widely used self-help approach that may influence psychological andphysiological processes underlying sleep. This cross-sectional study explored whether self-selected pre-sleep music moderates the association between psychological distress (stateanxiety, mood disturbance, stress) and subjective sleep quality. Adults (N = 269, 52.6%female; Mage = 27.7, SD = 9.0) completed validated self-report measures of sleep quality(PSQI) and psychological distress. Pre-sleep music use was positively associated with poorersleep quality (r = .23, p < .01). Moderation analyses identified a marginal interaction betweenstate anxiety and music use (β = -.170, p = .050), and simple slope analyses imply a tentativedose-response pattern in which the anxiety-sleep association was strongest among individualswho seldom used music and progressively weaker among those reporting more frequent use.No moderation effects were observed for mood or stress (ps > .05). These preliminaryfindings indicate that self-selected pre-sleep music may be adopted as a coping-orientedeffort to attenuate state anxiety-related arousal, although it was not associated with betteroverall sleep quality.