Unveiling night eating syndrome: how it connects to mental health, insomnia, and quality of life in university students—a cross-sectional study

Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is a type of eating disorder that's often overlooked, yet it can seriously impact mental health, sleep quality, and overall well-being. Despite its significance, research on NES—especially among university students—remains limited. This study set out to determine how common NES is among university students in Jordan and explore its connections to mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and stress, as well as insomnia and overall quality of life. This cross-sectional study involving a total of 1214 university students (average age: 22.73 ± 3.4 years). NES was identified using the Night Eating Questionnaire (NEQ), with a clinical cutoff score of ≥ 25. Mental health was assessed using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21), while insomnia levels were measured through the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI). To dig deeper into these relationships, we ran logistic regression analyses. NES was found to be highly prevalent, affecting 58.2% of participants in this study. Women were 1.94 times more likely to have NES than men (p-value < 0.001). Considering obese individuals as a reference category, overweight individuals had significantly higher odds of NES (B = 1.17, Exp(B) = 3.21, 95% CI 1.78, 5.78, p-value < 0.001), being approximately 3.2 times more likely to have NES. In contrast, individuals within the healthy BMI range (18.5–24.9 kg/m2) had a dramatically reduced likelihood of NES (B = -2.08, Exp(B) = 0.13, 95% CI 0.07, 0.22, p-value < 0.001), indicating an 87% reduction in NES risk compared to obese individuals. Compared to the reference category (never smokers), current smokers were significantly more likely to have NES (B = 1.02, Exp(B) = 2.78, 95% CI 1.77–4.39, p-value < 0.001), indicating that their odds of NES were approximately 2.8 times higher than those of never smokers. The former smokers demonstrated an even stronger association with NES (B = 2.60, Exp(B) = 13.43, 95% CI 8.16–22.12, p-value < 0.001), indicating that their odds of developing NES were approximately 13 times higher compared to never smokers. This study highlights how widespread NES is among university students and sheds light on its strong ties to gender, BMI, smoking, physical activity, and stress levels. Given these findings, it's clear that targeted efforts—like mental health screenings, smoking cessation programs, and stress management initiatives—are needed to help students improve their well-being and reduce NES risk. Night Eating Syndrome (NES) refers to the consumption of a large amount of food after dinner or waking up in the night to eat. We were interested in the question of how prevalent it is among Jordanian students of the university and whether it correlates with mental health, sleeping disturbances, and day-to-day well-being. Short, simple questionnaires were used to survey 1,214 Jordanian university students on NES, mood, stress, sleep, activity, and quality of life. Over fifty percent of the students were positive on NES. Females had a higher chance of having NES than males. NES was more frequently reported to occur among students who were smokers (particularly former smokers). Students who engaged in light physical activity were more likely to have a NES compared to those who were very active. The most evident psychological variable that was related to NES was stress, and depression, anxiety, insomnia, and quality of life were not significantly different between students with and without NES in our analyses. The results of such studies indicate that night eating and student well-being can be positively affected by the introduction of simple NES screening and stress-management, smoking-cessation, and physical-activity services in the context of student health.