There haven't been many scientific studies done on how weather affects sleep. I found one from a group of Psychiatrists at the University of Rochester. They asked 43 people (who were students at the University) to keep a detailed sleep diary for 105 days. Then they tried to correlate how well the students slept with 9 meteorologic variables - temperature, dew point, snow depth, precipitation, barometric pressure, wind speed, duration of daylight, visibility, and moon phase. Briefly, they found that high barometric pressure (associated with a sunny day), low precipitation, and lower temperatures were associated with spending more time in bed and having better quality sleep. This is opposite to what I would have expected based on how I generally feel when it's nice out versus when it's rainy out.
I don't know what all of this means in the big scheme of things. The group from Rochester admits that their study has some limitations. In addition, all of the comments that I found on sleep discussion forums disagreed with the results of their study and tended to side with the argument that rain = sleep. I guess, more scientific experimentation needs to be done to get a definitive answer to this one. Let me be the first to volunteer if they need someone to take a nap.
3 comments:
On sunny days I tend to be in a better mood, which means I am more motivated to get things accomplished, which brings a greater satisfaction at the end of the day, which when all is said and done means I sleep better. On rainy days I tend to be in a gloomy mood, not very motivated, and usually don't get as much accomplished, I go to bed feeling blecky and therefore I do not sleep as well. And if I happen to get a nap during the day-forget sleep that night no matter what the weather.
But that's just me.
Nice of Kevin to pose for a blog photo.
OK I thought that looked like Kevin too! Funny.
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