Feeling in Control vs. Living in Rhythm
Perceived control, daily rhythm, and college student flourishing: findings from an Owaves pilot survey and their implications for campuses, students, and student health plans.
July 2026. Based on pilot survey work by Serene Issa, Clara Voong and Lauren Serpico, Ph.D.
Summary
College student mental health has deteriorated over more than a decade, and prevention-oriented approaches that reach students before crisis are increasingly urgent. This paper reports a pooled analysis of two Owaves pilot surveys (combined n = 10) examining locus of control — the belief that one’s own actions shape one’s outcomes — alongside measures of sleep, physical activity, mood, life satisfaction, social functioning, and scheduling behavior. Most respondents scored as internally oriented and reported high life satisfaction and strong relationships. Yet the same respondents reported insufficient sleep, below-guideline physical activity, and depression-screening scores at the conventional risk threshold. We interpret this divergence between felt control and enacted rhythm in light of the sleep and circadian literature, draw out its implications for campus leaders, students and families, and student health plans, and describe the randomized controlled trial now underway at UC San Diego that moves the underlying hypothesis from pilot to formal test.
Introduction
The decline in college student mental health is well documented and predates the pandemic. Analyses of national survey data found the share of U.S. undergraduates screening for moderate-to-severe depression rising from roughly 23% in 2007 to about 41% in 2018 (Duffy et al., 2019), and surveillance since then shows those elevated rates persisting rather than reverting (Lipson et al., 2022). By common campus estimates, roughly one in four undergraduates today screens positive for a common mental disorder such as anxiety or depression. Counseling capacity has not kept pace, and because outcomes tend to worsen the longer difficulties go unaddressed, attention has shifted toward prevention: low-stigma supports that operate in the ordinary texture of student life rather than at the point of crisis.
One under-examined site for that kind of prevention is the structure of the day itself — when students sleep, move, eat, study, and see other people, and how consistently. The pilot work reported here approached that question from a psychological angle: before asking whether students structure their days well, we asked whether they believe the shape of their lives is theirs to control in the first place.
Perceived control as a wellbeing variable
Locus of control, introduced by Julian Rotter (1966), describes a generalized expectancy about where outcomes come from. People with an internal orientation tend to attribute what happens to them to their own choices and effort; those with an external orientation attribute it to luck, fate, or powerful others. The construct has held up as a meaningful wellbeing variable: internal orientation is associated with stronger coping under stress, greater persistence toward goals, and — of particular relevance to any behavioral tool — a greater willingness to attempt difficult behavior change, presumably because effort is expected to pay off (Ng et al., 2006). For a company whose product is a daily planner, the construct is not academic trivia. If perceived control is both a marker of wellbeing and a precondition for behavior change, then how users experience control bears directly on whether structured planning can help them.
Methods
This analysis pools two contemporaneous survey administrations conducted for Owaves between December 2019 and February 2020, before pandemic-related disruption to daily routines, yielding a combined sample of ten respondents. The two administrations, led by Serene Issa and Clara Voong, used overlapping instruments and are treated here as a single descriptive pilot.
Respondents were a mixed, self-selected group familiar with the Owaves app: some were connected to the company, and several were college students — their primary identity at the time — representing a range of class years and majors spanning performing arts, computer science, psychology, health sciences, and design. Ages ranged from roughly 18 to 45, and the sample skewed female. Surveys were administered online through SurveyPlanet.
All respondents completed items from Rotter’s Locus of Control scale, a forced choice between paired statements (for example, “People’s misfortunes result from the mistakes they make” versus “Many of the unhappy things in people’s lives are partly due to bad luck”), scored such that lower totals indicate internal orientation. The broader battery drew short-form items from validated instruments — the PROMIS Sleep Disturbance scale, the Physical Activity Vital Sign, the PHQ-2 and GAD-2 screeners for depression and anxiety (Kroenke et al., 2003; Kroenke et al., 2007), the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Social Functioning Questionnaire, the Behavioral Activation for Depression Scale, and a time-management questionnaire — supplemented by open-ended questions about values and the shape of an ideal day. Because several measures were shortened from their validated forms, their internal validity is reduced; the analysis is descriptive, with no comparison group.
Findings
On the central construct, the result was clear: a majority of respondents scored as internally oriented. Several internally keyed items were endorsed nearly universally — respondents agreed that “what happens to me is my own doing,” that misfortunes tend to follow from people’s own mistakes, and that one should be willing to admit one’s own. The profile that emerges is of a group that believes its effort drives its outcomes: precisely the disposition the perceived-control literature associates with resilience and readiness for behavior change.
That confidence, however, sat alongside a more complicated behavioral picture. Most respondents reported difficulty falling or staying asleep on more than half the days of the preceding week, and none reported getting adequate sleep nearly every day. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity averaged about 3.4 days per week at roughly 31 minutes per session — on the order of 105 minutes weekly, below the 150-minute floor recommended in U.S. physical activity guidelines (Piercy et al., 2018). The median PHQ-2 depression-screening score was 3, at the conventional cut-off associated with an elevated probability of a depressive disorder (Kroenke et al., 2003), while anxiety screening on the GAD-2 remained below its threshold. And yet every respondent reported being satisfied with life, and social-functioning items indicated no difficulty maintaining close relationships — respondents uniformly agreed that they got on well with family.
These were also, by their own account, organized people. Most used calendars or planners — Google Calendar most commonly, followed by a physical planner and a daily-planning app — and most reported sticking to their schedules more often than not; roughly 80% agreed that scheduling helped them meet their health and academic goals, and respondents generally reported completing assignments on time and prioritizing obligations when circumstances demanded. Self-nominated health goals clustered around mental health, social life, mindfulness, and diet, with sleep and exercise also represented. Time, meanwhile, was being spent whether or not it was being planned: daily social-media use averaged about 4.2 hours. In the open-ended responses, most respondents described an ideal day organized around time with loved ones, with stated priorities varying by life stage — relationships foremost for the youngest respondents, stress management and physical health for older ones.
The value of a pilot this small lies not in any single estimate but in the pattern, and the pattern is a tension. Respondents who felt in control of their lives, satisfied with them, and connected to the people in them were, at the same time, under-slept, under-active, and screening at the threshold of depression risk. A sense of agency did not, on its own, translate into the time-structured behaviors that protect wellbeing. Subjective narratives of control and contentment, in other words, can sit directly on top of objective shortfalls in the behaviors that underpin mental and circadian health — and self-report of “doing fine” is not reliable evidence that those behaviors are in place.
Interpretation: why felt control and healthy rhythm diverge
The divergence is less paradoxical than it first appears. Perceived control is a belief; rhythm is a behavior; and beliefs do not schedule themselves into a 24-hour day. What the wider literature supplies is the reason the shortfall matters — and the reason timing, specifically, is the lever.
Sleep sits upstream of mental health, and the relationship is dose-dependent. In an analysis of more than 110,000 U.S. college students drawn from the National College Health Assessment, each additional night of insufficient sleep per week was associated with a more than 20% average increase in the risk of mental-health symptoms — approximately 21% for depressed mood, 25% for anxiety, and up to 28% for functional problems and suicidal ideation — and the association held as strongly among student-athletes as among their peers (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2019; Ramsey & Grandner). Large multi-university samples likewise find depression and anxiety symptoms each independently associated with poor sleep (Becker et al., 2018), consistent with a reciprocal relationship in which short sleep and low mood reinforce one another.
Timing compounds duration. Chronotype — the body’s dispositional preference for earlier or later hours — is independently associated with depression and anxiety symptoms and with alcohol use among college students (Miller et al., 2026), and non-morning chronotypes report poorer sleep quality and lower quality of life across physical, psychological, and social domains (Arastoo et al., 2024). Chronic misalignment between biological and social time — “social jetlag” — is associated with worse mood and functioning (Wittmann et al., 2006; Roenneberg & Merrow, 2016), and in a study of nearly 15,000 students, greater mismatch between body clock and class schedule tracked with grade-point averages lower by as much as roughly 0.4 points — about half a letter grade (Smarr & Schirmer, 2018). Finally, the mechanism that converts scheduling into mood protection is well characterized: behavioral activation research shows that low mood is maintained by withdrawal from rewarding activity and can be interrupted by deliberately scheduling specific, achievable, positively reinforcing behaviors (Dimidjian et al., 2011), with a brief protocol producing meaningful improvements in depression, rumination, and stress in moderately depressed university students (Gawrysiak et al., 2009).
Read against that literature, our respondents’ profile becomes legible. What they lacked was not motivation, organization, or belief in their own agency — they had all three. What was missing was a structure that translated those assets into consistently timed sleep, movement, and recovery. That gap is a design problem, and it is the problem circadian-aligned planning exists to solve.
Where Owaves fits
Owaves presents the day as a visual 24-hour wheel rather than a vertical list, inviting the user to place the building blocks of wellbeing — sleep, movement, meals, focused work or study, social connection, and rest — deliberately into the day, in step with their own body clock; its BodyClock AI layer uses individual chronotype to suggest timing for sleep, exercise, and deep work. The design intent is not to add obligations but to make the shape of the day visible and adjustable, so that a person who feels in control can act on it, at hours their biology can use.
The claim should be stated precisely. Owaves is a behavioral wellness tool designed to support a sense of control and a healthier daily rhythm; it is not a medical treatment, and the pilot reported here does not demonstrate that using the app raises locus of control or treats any condition. What the pilot establishes is a coherent and testable rationale — one that has now moved into a randomized trial, described below.
Implications
For campuses: student affairs, health and wellness, and counseling
These functions typically operate as one ecosystem, and their shared constraint is reach: clinical services help the students who arrive, while the larger population needs something upstream and low-stigma. Daily-rhythm tools are a complement to counseling rather than a substitute for it — they speak in the register of skills and habits rather than diagnosis, which lowers the barrier to engagement for students who would never book an appointment. The pilot also carries a practical caution for program design and assessment: students who report feeling satisfied and in control may nonetheless be running the sleep and activity deficits most consequential for their mental health, so wellbeing programming should measure behavior, not only sentiment. Because the same behaviors that protect mood also track with focus, energy, and academic performance, treating how students structure their day as part of the wellbeing strategy plausibly serves retention and belonging as well.
For students and families
The finding most worth internalizing is gently counterintuitive: feeling on top of your life is real and valuable, but it is not the same as having a day your body can run on. It is entirely possible — our respondents demonstrated it — to feel capable and connected while carrying a sleep deficit that quietly drags on mood, energy, and concentration. The remedy is not more willpower; it is structure: seeing the whole 24 hours at once and placing sleep, movement, meals, and time with the people you care about into it on purpose. For families, that reframing offers a concrete, non-clinical way to support a student — a shared vocabulary for “is your week actually set up to hold you?” that is easier to ask, and to answer, than “are you okay?”
For student health plans and their buyers
For those who design and purchase student coverage, the relevant question is whether upstream, scalable, non-pharmacological levers deserve a place in a portfolio strained by rising mental-health utilization. Three considerations argue for attention. The dose-response relationship between insufficient sleep and mental-health symptoms marks sleep as a modifiable driver of downstream demand rather than a soft amenity. The approach aligns with the broader movement toward precision lifestyle medicine — individually tailored, technology-enabled, behavior-first prevention (Ma et al., 2016) — which is the direction much preventive strategy is heading. And digital planning tools carry low marginal cost relative to clinical capacity. A pilot of ten cannot and should not support a coverage decision; what it supports is watching the category seriously, with the UC San Diego trial below as the near-term evidence to evaluate.
Limitations
The limits of this work should be stated as plainly as its findings. The pooled sample was small and self-selected, drawn by convenience from people already familiar with the app; although several respondents were college students and the group was diverse in age and field of study, it was not designed to represent the broader student population, constraining external validity. Several instruments were administered in shortened form, reducing internal validity for those measures. The design was cross-sectional, with a single time point and no comparison group, so no causal claims about scheduling, circadian alignment, and mental health can be drawn. Chronotype and sleep timing were not measured directly; the body-clock framing is an interpretive lens consistent with what was measured, not a result demonstrated by these data. All measures were self-reported. The appropriate reading of this pilot is as instrument development and hypothesis generation — which is precisely the role it has played.
From pilot to randomized trial
The hypothesis this pilot surfaced — that circadian-aligned daily planning can convert felt control into a rhythm that measurably supports wellbeing — is now under formal test. UC San Diego researchers have launched a randomized controlled trial, Testing the Effectiveness of an Intervention That Aligns Circadian Rhythm With Daily Activities on Student Flourishing (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT07410585), in which approximately 800 UC San Diego undergraduates are randomized over roughly seven weeks to daily planning with the Owaves: My BodyClock app or to a control condition. Outcomes span trait and state measures of flourishing — subjective happiness, energy and vitality, focus and attention — along with the mix of activities students engage in and their likelihood of seeking physical and mental-health resources. The study is led by psychology professor Karen Dobkins and bioengineering professor Benjamin Smarr, with doctoral co-investigator Sophia North, in collaboration with UC San Diego’s Department of Psychology, Center for Circadian Biology, and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. Enrollment began in early 2026, with preliminary results anticipated later this year. The trial can be followed on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT07410585).
Conclusion
The most human finding in this pilot was also the simplest. Respondents wanted days organized around the people and the health they care about, and they believed those days were theirs to shape — and they still were not sleeping enough. Closing that gap is not a matter of trying harder; it is a matter of being able to see the whole day and design it in step with one’s own biology. That is the work Owaves was built for, and the proposition the science is now testing. We welcome conversation with campus leaders, families, and plan administrators who want to explore it.
Acknowledgments: This paper builds on pilot survey work conducted for Owaves by Serene Issa, Clara Voong and Lauren Serpico, Ph.D., whose instrument development and analysis form its empirical basis. We thank the participants for their time and candor.
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