It's rainy here today. I actually like rainy days, especially when I have the time and ability to take a nice rainy day nap (which doesn't happen very often anymore...). I, like most of you, get sleepy when it rains. In fact, I'm tired right now. I was wondering this morning if there is a scientific explanation to why people feel so sluggish when it rains. So....I looked it up. And what I found may surprise you.
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.
