The sweaty agony that rising temperatures can bring is what anyone who tried to sleep in a heatwave knows. It will be hard to find a cool spot on the bed because of global warming.
According to billions of sleep measurements from watches around the world, high temperatures caused by climate change are already linked to substantial losses in sleep duration, equivalent to about 11 nights of shortened sleep each year.
Increasing nighttime temperatures will only make things worse. If nothing is done to curb fossil fuel emissions, hot nights could erode up to 58 hours of sleep per year.
The losses were seen across seasons, social demographic, and climates.
The authors found more sleep loss in lower-income nations with less access to electrical fans or air conditioners. Elderly people and females were vulnerable.
Kelton Minor from the University of Copenhagen is the lead author of the study.
We show that erosion occurs when people fall asleep and wake up during hot weather.
The findings are based on data from the sleep trackers of more than 47,000 people. Their records were compared to global meteorological data.
On very warm nights, sleep duration declined by an average of 14 minutes.
The chance of getting less than 7 hours of sleep was slightly increased by nighttime temperatures greater than 25 degrees Celsius.
In the long-term, the lost minutes of sleep could affect human health and productivity.
A single night of sleep loss can have a big impact on a person.
Even with a big old sleep-in, it is hard to climb back out of sleep debt.
Our lives depend on a stable core body temperature, something that our bodies are highly adapted to.
They do something remarkable every night without most of us knowing, by dilating our blood vessels and increasing blood flow to our hands and feet.
Our bodies can't shed heat while we sleep if the environment is warmer than we are. It becomes more difficult to remove heat from the body on humid nights.
The sample size is not perfect. Middle-aged men are more likely to wear Wearable technology. Over the course of years, the data offers an unprecedented insight into natural sleep patterns.
Researchers used 21 different climate models to project the losses of sleep from nighttime heat into the future.
In the worst-case scenario, sleep losses from nighttime heat will result in over 15 short nights of sleep per year. We can keep it to about 13 short nights of sleep.
The average is just that. An additional 7 nights of sleep could be experienced by adults in the warmest regions of the world. That could be an underestimate because the smartwatches are not as widely available in these parts of the world.
Future planetary-scale research is needed that systematically investigates the impact of rising temperatures and other climate hazards on the sleep outcomes of vulnerable populations, particularly those residing in low-income countries and communities.
One Earth published the study.
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