The COVID-19 pandemic has changed practically every aspect of our lives: sleep is no exception. With a-synchronous classes online, maybe you aren’t feeling the push to get up early and are instead able to sleep in on those days you need it. With social events cancelled and overall, a lot less activity to miss out on, maybe you are taking those much needed mid-day naps. Or perhaps studying and working in your room all day is making it all the more difficult to get to sleep in the same room at night. With the overall unpredictable reality of the pandemic, maybe you are experiencing heightened anxious thoughts keeping you up at night. Each sleeper's experience is different based on a variety of factors and new research is showing that overall, many of us are experiencing changes in our sleep. In the following module, we will detail brand new research that captures a snapshot of how a global pandemic is affecting the way we sleep. (Note: most of these studies were conducted in Canada and through online surveys. Findings are from unpublished research, recently presented at the online Sleep 2020 Conference ).
In an online study that surveyed 5,525 participants globally, researchers found that overall, participants who reported any serious sleep difficulty (including sleep maintenance, early awakenings, or sleep initiation) increased from 36% before the beginning of the pandemic to 51% during the pandemic (Robillard, 2020). When looking at 1,434 participants in Quebec Canada, researchers found that participants showed increased anxiety, depression, and fatigue as well as higher rates of new onset of insomnia, three times higher in fact, as compared to a 2018 baseline study (Morin, 2020). Although it is clear that the pandemic has certainly had a negative impact on some people’s sleep, this is not true for all the participants studied. Those who had later wake up times (but the same bed times) during the pandemic compared to before saw no big changes to their sleep behavior. Additionally, 5.8% of participants saw an increase on their Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), indicating better sleep quality. On the other hand, 17.5% of participants saw a decrease in their PSQI, indicating worse sleep quality. Thus, although some people have seen an improvement in their sleep or no change at all, we can see here that there certainly is a significant trend of the pandemic negatively affecting the quality of sleep for many individuals worldwide.
Just as sleeping habits seem to have changed during the pandemic, dreaming has as well. In a study of 968 Canadian participants, 53% participants reported a change in dreaming recall (remembering one’s dreams): 19% of participants reported a decrease in dream recall whereas 34% reported an increase in dream recall during the pandemic (Solomonova, 2020). These participants were also asked to categorize their dreams within a subset of topics; pandemic, natural threat, human threat, inefficiency, death, paralysis, and paranormal. One would expect that during a global pandemic, most people would be dreaming about a pandemic. On the contrary, the most common dream topic was about inefficiency, with over 62% of participants dreaming about this topic (Solomonova, 2020). Only 39% of participants reported dreaming about the pandemic (Solomonova, 2020).
As seen in Morin’s study, a decline in mental health (shown in increased anxiety, depression and fatigue) has increased during this pandemic, which Solomonova saw reflected in the way people interact with their dreams. Severely stressed participants in their study had significantly more dream recall (compared to low stressed participants), more bad dreams (compared to low stressed and moderate stressed participants), and more nightmares (compared to low and moderate stressed participants) (Solomonova, 2020).
Although these results which look at the general population are fascinating, they may or may not resonate with you as students. Young adults have very different sleep and social patterns then older populations so it is plausible to assume the results above might not be the same on average for a younger age group. However, the following study led by Dr. Geneviève Forest is solely based on sleeping patterns of adolescents in Canada ages 12-25.
Researchers separated 588 participants into four age groups (12-14, 15-17, 18-21, 22-25) and asked questions about their sleep habits, subjective sleep quality, sleep chronotype, life habits, and their emotional state before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers saw that on weekdays, all age groups slept around an hour more overall and shifted to later bedtimes (on average one hour later) and later wake up times (on average two hours later) (Forest, 2020). With less commuting and more asynchronous classes, perhaps you are also experiencing less external pressure to get up early during the week. Bedtimes during weekends were later for 12-21 year olds, but not 22-25 year olds (Forest, 2020). Wake up times during weekends were only later for 12-14 year olds (Forest, 2020). Tip: If you are having trouble planning out a consistent bedtime, check out the Time Management Module.
Interestingly, the data showed that sleep latency (time spent in bed trying to fall asleep) increased for some age groups during the pandemic while decreasing for others. On weekends, 18-25 year olds spent more time in bed trying to fall asleep while only 22-25 year olds had increased sleep latency on weekdays (Forest, 2020). For 15-17 year olds, sleep latency actually decreased on weekdays (Forest, 2020). Similarly, sleep quality improved significantly only for those in the 15-17 age group (Forest, 2020). Not much of a shift was seen for 18-25 year olds in terms of sleep quality and daytime sleepiness (Forest, 2020). . Tip: If you are having trouble getting to bed, check out the modules Can’t Fall Asleep and Bedtime Routines.
Researchers also saw an increase in nocturnal and early morning awakenings as well as an increase in nightmares for 18-25 year olds during the pandemic (Forest, 2020). Overall, these results point to the trend that sleep has improved for younger adolescents and worsened for older adolescents during the pandemic.
Forest, G., Morin, C., Pennestri, M., Robillard, R., & Solomonova, E. (2020, August 27th–30th). Sleeping Through an Emerging Pandemic, from Youth to the Elderly: How North Americans' Sleep, Sleep Disorders, and Dreams Changed during the COVID-19 Outbreak [Conference presentation]. Sleep 2020 Convention, Virtual Meeting.
