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PANDEMIC MADE PEOPLE SLEEP LONGER, BUT DREAM MORE OF DEATHS
- By The Financial District
- May 9, 2021
- 2 min read
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down, including how we sleep. While many of us are now sleeping more poorly because of the added stress and worry, some are sleeping better. Why?
"We're basically a fatigued society living contrary to our natural [circadian] rhythm, says somnologist Dr. Hans-Guenter Weess, executive board member of the German Society for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine (DGSM), Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.
"Eighty percent of us are jolted awake by an alarm clock, although we're plainly not yet well-rested." But thanks to the pandemic, a lot of us don't have to get up as early in the morning as we used to.
People now working from home don't have to commute, and many kids are being schooled at home or alternate between online lessons and lessons in school, so they don't have to get up as early as well.
"Energy providers report that peak morning consumption has been an hour later during the pandemic," Weess says.
"This means that if you let people sleep longer, they will. Not having to get up so early in the morning is especially favorable for young people of school or university age," adds Dr. Dora Triche, DGSM board member and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Nuremberg Hospital. Adolescents' sleep-wake cycle is "delayed," she explains, so they get tired later and sleep longer - if you let them.
While the impact on sleep duration may be positive, researchers have also charted the pandemic's potentially negative influence on dreams, and 2020 studies found that countless more people have dreamed about unwanted hugs, lost passports, closed borders, overcrowded spaces and death.
Hundreds of volunteers told their dreams to Helsinki University scientists during a COVID-19 lockdown and researchers found that around a third of the dreams were clearly linked to the pandemic. Some 15 percent of respondents in a US study said they had worse dreams during the pandemic.
