- Climate changes reduce sleep by 60 hours
- Researchers say it is much harder to adapt to warmer temperatures than colder ones
- Developing nations suffer more due to a lack of air conditioning
A new study at the University of Copenhagen has found that by the year 2099, suboptimal temperatures could reduce at least 50-58 hours of sleep per person each year.
Researchers indicated that on very warm nights (above 30⁰ Celsius) sleep can come down to just around 14 minutes too. Also, there was an increase in the chance of people getting less than 7 hours of sleep in hot temperatures.
When a controlled experiment was done in lab setups it was seen that both humans and animals could not sleep properly in too hot or too cold situations.
“Our results indicate that sleep – an essential restorative process integral for human health and productivity – may be degraded by warmer temperatures. In order to make informed climate policy decisions moving forward, we need to better account for the full spectrum of plausible future climate impacts extending from today’s societal greenhouse gas emissions choices.”, said First author Kelton Minor of the University of Copenhagen.
Climate change can cause some huge changes in people’s lives on Earth and including changes in hours of sleep humans are taking
Researchers have made this conclusion by using random sleep data on a global level collected from sleep tracking wristbands. The data was huge and included 7 million records from 47,000 adults who were from over 68 nations.
New researchers have told that humans can adapt to colder temperatures much faster than hotter ones. It was seen that sleep reduction was maximum in warm temperatures when different seasons, demographics, and climates were analyzed
But in the outer real world, it is seen that people change their immediate surroundings by using tools like fans and air conditioners to get a more comfortable way of lifestyle.
Developing nations face this more because developed countries already have air conditioners while those don’t. Although this theory wasn’t proved further because researchers lacked any data on AC access among the subjects they experimented on.
In the future, researchers want to work with global climate scientists, sleep researchers, and tech providers to increase the accuracy of their results of behavioral analyses. Some have also shown interest in studying the effect of increasing outdoor temperature on sleep patterns of those people who already live in hot climates and have little access to air conditioners.
