- In summer, some people find their sleep gets badly disrupted.
- This can be down to a few key things, according to sleep scientist David Brodner.
- He said our hormones are affected by the long days and excessive sunlight.
- But our lifestyle choices, such as using phones and tablets, and drinking too much, also have an impact.
- To get back in sync you can invest in black out blinds, get as much light as you can at the start of the day, and exercise.
Summer is great in so many ways. The long days can be spent lying in the park — provided you wear adequate sunscreen — and people generally seem to be in better spirits (Although not everyone.)
But summer can bring its issues too. The long, warm days are great for our social lives, but they can also wreak havoc with our sleep.
David Brodner, a leading sleep specialist who is double board certified in otolaryngology and sleep medicine, and founder of the Center for Sinus, Allergy and Sleep Wellness in Palm Beach County, Florida, told Business Insider there are several ways summer can ruin our sleep patterns, both biologically and socially.
Light affects our hormones
The first reason is our hormones, which the National Sleep Foundation lists as one of the most common causes of insomnia. In particular, melatonin production, which is the hormone produced by the body to make us sleepy when it gets dark, is regulated by sunlight, which enters our eyes, and triggers our brain to stay awake.
When the sun goes down and it gets darker, our melatonin level rises, we feel tired, and it's the signal for the brain it's time to sleep.
"In the summer, the days do get longer, so we are being stimulated by sunlight later and later, and depending on where you live it might be very late," Brodner said. "And so this natural sunlight stimulus for the melatonin is delayed so your body won't feel like going to sleep until later in the evening and into the nighttime."
So as the day lengthens, our natural sleep pattern, called the circadian rhythm, is delayed.
To combat this, Brodner says you can create an artificial night time by doing certain things.
"Let's say maybe your job or something requires you to be outside, you can actually use these certain kinds of sunglasses that block out the sunlight, so that it's not as stimulating to your eyes," he said. "This is what we use for shift workers, who work all night and they're trying to sleep during the day — we tell them to wear sunglasses as they drive home in the mornings so the sun doesn't stimulate them."
Creating a healthy sleeping environment in the bedroom is also important, such as getting blackout blinds, and not having lights on in the evening.
Our devices don't help...
The second major disruptor is our devices — our phones, tablets, and televisions. Not only does this create light that can stop us from feeling sleepy, but it emits a particular blue wavelength of light which is the most stimulating part of sunlight to our brain for melatonin regulation.
Thirdly, in some places around the world, everyone has air conditioning. But in other places, people aren't so lucky. So when a particularly hot week comes around, it can be pretty unpleasant. Brodner said that it is actually harder to sleep when it gets hotter, because when your body is getting ready to sleep, its temperature decreases.
"So one of the things about this healthy sleep environment is that you want to reduce the temperature in your bedroom," he said. "There's some discussion of what the ideal sleep temperature is. It's between 60 and 67 fahrenheit. So keep it around 65. But during the summer it might be harder to do that, if you don't have an air conditioner, and the ambient air temperature is just going to be hotter in the summer."
A fourth reason is our summer schedules. When schools break up for the holidays, those with children will have to deal with them staying up much later than they would in school time. The parents schedule, however, stays the same.
There's also the matter of people in summer behaving like it's the summer holidays, even if they left school decades ago. People tend to be a lot more relaxed, and may stay up later as a result of the longer days.
...Neither does alcohol
This summertime illusion may go hand in hand with drinking more regularly, which is a fifth reason for disrupted sleep. Alcohol interferes with sleep, said Brodner, which isn't specific to summer, but it does seem more prevalent because "everyone feels like they're on vacation."
The biochemical reasons for this are that alcohol decreases slow-wave sleep, or deep sleep. That's the part of sleep where the brain has a chance to rearrange everything that's happened that day, save memories, and essentially throw out the junk.
"When you drink alcohol it makes you sleepy, and you fall right to sleep," Brodner continued. "But then as the alcohol wears off three, maybe four hours later, then it actually has the opposite effect, and it has a wakening effect."
People may then find they wake up a couple of hours after falling asleep hard because of the alcohol, and struggle to get back to sleep again. They also aren't likely to feel good: a dry mouth, heart racing, headaches.
"So once you wake up after the alcohol it really has interfered with your sleep for a lot of different reasons," Brodner said. "Heart effects, blood pressure, acid reflux — things that just the chemical compound of alcohol causes. All of those are interfering with sleep."
The health impacts of sleep deprivation are serious
The health impacts of not getting enough sleep can be severe. And you don't have to be up for 48 hours at a time to be sleep deprived. You can get the negative effects after just losing out on a few hours every night during the week, accumulating something called "sleep debt."
"If you think about it as a credit card, so on Monday through Friday if you're not getting your 7 hours, it's like putting a negative on your credit card, and we call it sleep debt," Brodner said. "So this sleep debt accumulates so that you could on a weekend, by sleeping extra, refill or repay the sleep debt.
"But generally, because people who have this habit do it every night, the sleep debt is too much, and you can't really repay it over the course of a weekend. You can improve it, repay maybe half or two thirds of it, but it's always rebuilding."
And if you accumulate too much sleep debt, it can have real negative consequences on your body. For instance, your ability to concentrate decreases, your memory is impaired, your ability to react falls, you have increased pain sensitivity, and your overall cognition is poorer.
Also, it can have an impact on your weight, as the amount of a hormone called ghrelin increases when we don't get enough sleep, which makes people hungrier for foods high in fat and sugar.
"And it also has an effect on the actual fat cells, so you will keep more fat," Brodner added. "There's an increase in diabetes, because sleep deprivation acts on the whole body's ability to react to insulin, being produced by your own body. Your body will get resistant to it. This is all from sleep deprivation — a lot of physical, hormonal changes that you don't even think about."
There are things you can do to get back in sync
You may think when you're tired you're a little slow and groggy, but sleep deprivation has a lot of effects on the whole body as well. But you can help yourself out by staying away from screens at night, reducing your alcohol intake, and making sure your bedroom is dark and at a cooler temperature, if possible.
"If you have to wake up, try to get a lot of bright light," Brodner said. "So if the sun is out, that's the easiest way. Go out for a walk or a jog, walk your dog... I tell people go to the gym because it's very stimulating, because of the other people around you, and exercise is a great way to get your body to wake up by increasing metabolism.
"And they always have those overwhelmingly powerful fluorescent lights and music. So all of those factors help my patients get awake if they need to start their day at certain times."
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