Climate Change Causing People To Sleep Less, Claims Study

Warmer temperatures will cost humans 50 to 58 hours of sleep per person per year by the end of this century (2099), a new study has claimed. The sleep loss - of about 10 minutes per night - will happen due to rising night temperatures caused by climate change.

The study has been published in the journal One Earth. It is based on the data collected by wristbands and smart watches, which measure sleep duration and its timing, of more than 47,000 people in 68 countries between September 2015 and October 2017.

"We found that nights that were randomly warmer than average eroded human sleep duration within individuals globally," Kelton Minor, the co-author of the study, told HealthDay News.

"We estimated that people slept less and the probability of having a short night of sleep increased as nights became hotter," the Denmark based student in planetary social and behavioral data science at the University of Copenhagen further said.

People living in many parts of India have been experiencing extreme temperature, with mercury coming close to 50 degrees Celsius last week. Not just days, nights too have been hot because of heatwave-like conditions.

Researchers who carried out the study said likelihood of getting less than seven hours of sleep increased by 3.5 per cent if minimum outside nighttime temperatures keeps exceeding due to climate change.

“The 3.5% sleep loss may initially look like a small number, but it adds up," Alex Agostini, lecturer in the department of justice and society at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, told CNN. She was not involved in the study.

Heat adversely impacts sleep as the person's body temperature must fall in order to fall asleep. Human body sheds heat when we go to sleep. But that will become harder as temperature rises, the study said.

Lack of sleep has a lot of potential health implications, including hearth disease and health problems. According to Washington-based National Sleep Foundation, adults should get seven to nine hours of sleep.