How Does The Climate Crisis Affect Our Well-Being?
Climate change has a lot of bad effects on the environment. Most of us picture scenes from the end of the world, like skies full of smoke from forest fires, storms hitting the coasts, rising sea levels, and floods.
Little things that happen every day that are affected by climate change are the ones that come to our minds the least... A bad night's sleep is one of the effects of climate change that we might not pay enough attention to.
Did you know that weather has a lot to do with how people sleep? In this piece, we talked about whether rising temperatures at night may make it harder to sleep because of climate change.
Sleep is very important for keeping your body fit. However, studies show that around one-third of people have trouble sleeping.
This is proof that not getting enough sleep has turned into a serious public health issue. Not getting enough sleep hurts both mental and physical processes by making people more likely to get sick.
Getting enough and regular sleep is a very important part of keeping the body healthy and repairing itself.
As an example, not getting enough sleep can make it harder for your body to heal muscles and get rid of waste from your brain.
At the same time, not getting enough sleep can make the immune system less effective, throw off the metabolism, and make the body's inflammation levels rise overall.
All of these are affected by temperature, which is one of the things that affects sleep. Circadian rhythms, which are natural biological processes that happen every 24 hours, control when we sleep and wake up.
A big part of going asleep and staying asleep is thermoregulation, which means keeping your body temperature in check.
As the body gets ready for sleep, skin blood vessels widen. This helps the body lose heat and sends an important signal for sleep to begin: the core body temperature drops.
Before the core temperature drops, the temperature rises in the farthest away parts of the body, like the hands and feet. Some parts of the skin that are farther away from the core also help cool it down in the evening and early morning.
When you go to sleep, your core body temperature drops. It stays low all night and rises again just before you wake up. By changing circadian body temperatures, this is where ambient temperatures can get in the way of normal sleep processes.
Some researchers who are looking into the link between climate change and sleep have found that temperature has a three times bigger effect on people living in low-income countries, and twice as great an effect on older adults.
It has also been said that people who live in hot countries have more trouble sleeping when the temperature rises, even though they are supposed to be able to adapt to even hotter climates.
From this, we can say that people aren't very good at changing the way they sleep to deal with a warmer environment.