Explained! How climate change is costing you your precious sleep?

Waking up in your sweat and having restless nights every time the temperature rises by a few degrees is the worst feeling ever. And all of you living in parts of north and central India including Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh can relate to it. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued a heat wave warning on Sunday as the maximum temperature in several parts of Delhi crossed 45 degrees Celsius and Najafgarh recorded the highest temperature at 46.3 degrees Celsius.

What's alarming, however, is that just a few hours before the heatwave warning, a new worldwide study highlighted how climate change is costing us our precious nighttime rest. Sadly, it's no secret that sleep deprivation can ramp up heart disease risk, intensify mood disorders, and slow one's ability to work or learn. Yet another harmful effect of climate change on our lives.

So, let’s delve deeper into it!

A new study has linked sleep loss and all the problems that come with it to climate change. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have found that “ever-warmer nighttime temperatures, nudged higher by climate change, push bedtimes later and wake times earlier, costing us precious nighttime rest”.

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Published last week in the journal One Earth, the study stated that people are already losing shut-eye in warm environments and it’s predicted that it will further decrease as temperatures rise due to climate change, especially in lower-income and elderly communities. It will potentially cost sleepers 50 to 58 hours of sleep every year by the end of this century.

It clearly reflects how climate change is playing out in people’s everyday lives, and not just in catastrophic ways like more droughts and flooding. Sleep loss from climate change “is already happening, right now, not in the future but today,” says Kelton Minor, the lead author of the study and a researcher at the University of Copenhagen.

Alarming data from the study

Kelton Minor and his colleagues analysed data collected worldwide between 2015 and 2017 from nearly 50,000 people's wristband activity trackers, which recorded when those participants fell asleep, woke up, and how they slept in between. Though the data were anonymized, the researchers could match sleepers' locations with location-specific climate data.

Researchers compared the sleep data with local outdoor temperatures and came up with their findings. One limitation of the study, however, is that the tracker had no information about indoor conditions, or whether air conditioning was in use. The study, however, did look at continuous records of individual people, including how they slept on a cool night in June versus a hot one a few days later, or how they reacted to an unseasonably warm February night.

Findings!

The study estimates that people are already losing an average of 44 hours of sleep per year and as global warming continues, people will find it hard to get a good night’s rest. It will potentially cost us all 50 to 58 hours of sleep every year.

The results showed that people slept most when outside temperatures were below 50°F (10°C). Above that threshold, their chances of sleeping less than seven hours went way up. Above 77°F (25°C), the losses accelerated. When outdoor nighttime temperatures topped 86°F (30°C), people lost an average of about 15 minutes a night.

Sara Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Irvine says that it may not sound like a lot, but it’s “actually quite a big deal”, especially because those 15 minutes likely come from the uber-valuable “slow wave” sleep stage. On an average, we only get about an hour of that type of sleep a night. So taking away 15 minutes from it cuts a big chunk of restorative time.

Who'sat risk?

Climate change and rising temperatures hit some groups worse than others. Senior citizens are twice as sensitive as healthy adults, the study found. They could lose anywhere around 30 minutes of sleep every night under similar conditions. Women are also affected more, losing about 25 per cent more sleep than the average at warmer temperatures.

People in lower and middle-income countries suffer about three times as much disrupted sleep time as those from high-income ones, which the study says could be because of less access to air conditioning.
“This moves the effects of climate change out of the catastrophic and existential and shows how it affects us every day,” says Jamie Mullins, an environmental economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was not involved in the research. “It’s going to cost us all in small ways that really add up.”

What’s the solution?

Many would say one possible solution to climate-induced sleep deficits could be getting a lot of air conditioners. But no, it’s not! ACs actually warm the outdoor environment and add to climate change and global warming, since most of the electricity for it comes from burning fossil fuels. Also, the excess heat sucked out of your house heats up the air outside.

So, then what is the solution? Experts say that the obvious solution is to stop climate change and take necessary actions to reverse the harmful effects of the same. Since the study further clarifies the link between climate and our everyday lives, it has become impossible to ignore our social responsibility to fix the cause of the problem.

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