SLEEP 2026 | Why should climate change be a priority for sleep research?

So climate change is a global phenomenon. It impacts different areas of the world differently and has different effects in different parts of the world, in different climates, and in different communities. But what is common is that changes are happening. So the question is, how do changes happening in different places of the world impact an individual person’s sleep? What you have to understand is that global changes result in regional changes. Regional changes result in neighborhood and area changes. And changes within these smaller areas change where you live. And when where you live changes, it changes where you sleep. So if you have a person sleeping in a bedroom that’s a little too hot, with the fan on, and it’s harder to sleep, that person is in a neighborhood where there might be other people experiencing similar things, which might be in a region that is experiencing certain kinds of change, and that region is embedded within these different levels. So if we’re going to understand how an individual is sleeping, we can gain a better understanding if we look at it in that larger context.

And so the reason why climate change requires an updated sleep science agenda is because when the climate changes, it impacts your sleep. And it doesn’t just impact your sleep, it’s impacting the sleep of everyone around you because they’re all experiencing the same thing. And when everyone’s sleep changes, population health changes, population well-being changes, schedules change, and communities change. And when communities change, regions change, and when regions change, whole nations can change. When you look at population-level trends in the US, we’ve published data, and others have shown, that not only is there a gradual decline in the amount of sleep that people are getting, that gradual decline is disproportionately experienced by different parts of the population who experience different kinds of social and environmental pressures. And that actually explains part of the reason why we have population-level changes in health outcomes like obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure, because sleep is related to these things. So when you have more difficulty sleeping because electric bills are too high, or because of globalization and shipping, and it impacts your life through different kinds of disruption, if your sleep is disrupted and your neighbor’s sleep is also disrupted in a similar way, and this is being felt on a population level, population health changes, and that can impact everything.

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