COVID-19 and its associated
quarantine have disrupted pretty
much every aspect of our lives.
If you’re like plenty of people,
that includes your sleep, with the
pandemic bollixing up what might
have been the most predictable
and peaceful eight hours of your
day. Unless, that is, you’re like
plenty of other people, and the
quarantine has led to some of the
best sleep you’ve ever had.
“There are upsides and
downsides,” says Dr. Cathy
Goldstein, associate professor
of neurology at the University of
Michigan Sleep Disorders Center.
“We have more time, so we’re
devoting more of it to sleeping—
but we can also get too much.” At
the same time, she points out, the
pandemic might be causing other
people to get too little.
Sleep is governed by two
systems: the homeostatic and
the circadian. The homeostatic
is simply a function of how much
sleep you’ve had and when you
need more. The circadian is
pegged to the 24-hour clock and
the daylight- nighttime cycle.
Left to ourselves, with no
external clock but the rising and
setting of the sun, we would all
fall naturally into an approximatemidnight to 8 a.m. sleep cycle.
During quarantine, it appears that
some people are finding their way
back to that primordial sleep state.
In two new papers in the journal
Current Biology, researchers had
only good news to report.
“They found the subjects
were sleeping slightly longer
and at more consistent times
across the course of the week,”
Goldstein says. “They found
a reduction in ‘social jet lag,’
which is the deviation from the
midnight to 8 a.m. natural cycle.”
But things are also more
complicated. People with jobs that
allow them to work from home
may be less physically active than
normal, which can disrupt the
homeostatic system; they may
have less exposure to outdoor light
and dark, which can disrupt the
circadian.
And those are people in the
best and most enviable work
situations. People who lost their
jobs and parents facing unknowns
about school reopenings are likely
to be kept up by profound anxiety.
Those on the front lines of the
pandemic now define their lives by
little but work, which takes its own
toll in terms of stress.
Other factors that mess withHow the pandemic is
changing the way we sleep
NOT EVERYONE
IS TOSSING
AND TURNING
ALL NIGHT
DURING
QUARANTINE
By Jeffrey
Kluger
our sleep are more within our
control, especially our media diets.
The news has been especially
overstimulating lately, from the
corona virus itself, to systemic
racism and the uprisings to
protest the inequities, to the usual
partisan mud fights. Gorge on that
all day, and you go to bed stuffed
and anxious. When it comes to
news, then, less is more. “We can
get a good update in five minutes,”
says Dr. David Neubauer, associate
professor at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine and
a faculty member at the school’s
Sleep Disorders Center. “We don’t
need five hours.”
The news-delivery system also
matters. We carry our phones and
tablets right into our beds at night,
exposing us to both information
overload and to blue- wavelength
light that is thought (though not
proved) to suppress the sleep-
inducing hormone melatonin.
“I have people put their phones to
bed at least one hour before they
go to sleep,” Goldstein says.
Clearly, we have yet to control
the coronavirus pandemic, but as
individuals, we can try to control
our response to it. Improving
our sleep might be one of the
healthiest responses of all.SLEEP
STATS
Americans are
staying up
later and
sleeping
longer under
COVID-19
lockdown
conditions Difference in
weekday sleep
duration92 % of subjects reported getting 7 or more hours of sleep a night—up from 84% pre-lockdown+ 30
MINUTES
Difference in
weekend sleep
duration+ 24
MINUTES
Difference in
bedtime on
weekdays+ 50
MINUTES
Difference in
bedtime on
weekends