Get A Tent And Improve Your Sleep
Get A Tent and Improve Your Sleep
In a recent article in the Guardian it said that there had been a study on sleep where a group had been sent camping in the neighbouring hills and this had improved their sleeping habits.
The study suggested that watching TV, checking the phone, using an iPad or computer late in the evening or at night is spoiling our sleep.
The field study found that people fell asleep about two hours earlier when they were in the countryside and didn’t have access to electrical gadgets and artificial lighting.
In the study the participants were sent to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. They found that it helped reset people’s internal clocks and reversed the tendency of artificial light pushing bedtime later into the night.
The modern environment has changed the timing of our internal clocks and this in turn has altered our sleep patterns.
Kenneth Wright of the sleep and chronobiology laboratory at the University of Colorado was the director of this study. He thinks that just a weekend away can reset the internal clock rapidly.
The people on this study didn’t have torches, phones or other gadgets they only had the sunlight, moonlight and campfires.
The campers went to bed about 2 hours earlier than when they were at home and they slept on average for 10 hours a night. Their average at home was 7.5 hours. The participants were more active in the day and were exposed to light levels up to 13 times higher than they received at home or at work.
Melatonin, the sleep hormone was measured on their return and it was discovered that their melatonin began to rise and prepare the body for sleep more than two and a half hours earlier than it did before the trip to the mountains.
Even though the size of the study was small they felt that their results were really strong. The circadian clock in all of us responds to the natural light – dark cycle and is part of our physiology.
To see how quickly the natural environment could change sleep patterns nine people aged between 19 and 37 were sent on a weekend’s camping. This time they could take torches and headlamps for reading. Another five people were left to stay at home for comparison. This happened at the height of summer and the weekend campers still went to bed earlier than the five who stayed at home. By spending the weekend outdoors the campers were exposed to four times more light than the others.
This is only a small study but there could be something in the findings and what our modern lives and our home environment with its gadgets, artificial light, temperature control etc. might be doing to our bodies.
Ian
