Associations Between Sleep Quality and Anxiety Among Undergraduate Engineering Students: A Longitudinal Panel Study

Sleep is important to university students’ mental health, but longitudinal evidence on associations between sleep and anxiety is limited among engineering undergraduates. Using a three-wave balanced panel of 281 engineering undergraduates (W1–W3) at a Chinese university, this study examined longitudinal associations among sleep quality, sleep duration, and anxiety symptoms using a cross-lagged panel model, complemented by individual fixed-effects and adjacent-wave change-score analyses. Anxiety symptoms and sleep-quality problems were descriptively higher at W2 and W3 than at W1, while average sleep duration changed little. Poorer sleep quality at W2 was significantly associated with higher anxiety at W3, and higher anxiety at W2 was significantly associated with poorer sleep quality at W3. Average paths in both directions across the two adjacent-wave intervals were significant; interval-specific reciprocal prospective associations were statistically detectable only from W2 to W3. Independent cross-lagged associations between sleep duration and anxiety were generally weak. Complementary analyses showed significant contemporaneous within-person associations and synchronous changes between deteriorating sleep quality and increasing anxiety. These findings advance the understanding of the relationship between sleep quality and anxiety and may inform further research on sleep support and anxiety risk identification in demanding educational contexts.