good night s sleep? yeah, so we all know just from personal experience that sound and sufficient slumber is really critical for our human functioning and well-being. and what people typically don t know is nighttime temperatures have been outpacing the rise in daytime temperatures across most regions globally in the recent record. and what we found through our global scale sleep study was that as nighttime temperatures become hotter, people slept less. and this really was consistent across the global temperature distribution, with hotter temperatures leading to progressively greater sleep loss per person. reporter: now your study estimates that people were already losing an average of 44 hours of sleep per year. and you also estimate that that number could rise to around 58 hours by 2099. how did you come up with that
to adapt and support actions that will help people to sleep better and be more resilient the nighttime heat. unfortunately, we didn t find much evidence that people are adapting well today. we actually found that people weren t catching up on hot sleep loss at night with additional sleep through napping, for instance. we even found that people who were already living in the hottest climate regions around the world, who would we suspect to have time to adapt were over twice as impacted per degree of warming. so we really need to identify and conduct additional research to help to reduce some these disparities and ensure that we can all sleep well in a warming world. and what about those people who live in very cold climates? so presumably, they benefit in that instance with a warming planet. did you do any research on that? yeah, i m glad you bring this issue up. for instance, when we look at
mortality, that s a u-shaped relationship. when it s really cold or really hot, we find the incidents of mortality increases on both sides. that s not what we found for sleep. across the entire global temperature distribution, we found evidence that colder nights help people to sleep better, and that hotter temperatures consistently and progressively erode time slept. unfortunately, that also means that we see projecting into the future that a warmer world will exacerbate some of these existing geographic disparities in nighttime sleep loss due to temperature without further climate action to reduce those. it is a fascinating study. kelton minor, thank you so much for joining us and sharing some of your material. appreciate it. thank you so much for having me on. america s top medical official has given an unprecedented warning about social media and mental health. the u.s. surgeon general says social media presents a, quote,
but it does so in an unequal way. so we found that the impacts were three times larger in lower and middle income companies compared to high-income countries, potentially suggesting there are underlying disparities in adaptive things like air conditioning. and the elderly were over twice as impacted per degree of warming and sleep loss, and that females were 25% more impacted than males. again, suggesting that there are disparities in this hidden nocturnal burden of nighttime warming. so what can we all do to counter this increasing loss of valuable sleep hours due to a warming planet? yeah, so insufficient sleep is associated with many of the same adverse physical and mental health outcomes shown to increase on hot day, including reduced cognitive performance, increased risk of injury and cardiovascular risks. so it s really important to try