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The mobile phones of 93,900 people revealed that people slept differently when the pandemic struck. The Swedes fell asleep the fastest, but the French were the ones who slept the longest.
The pandemic had a significant impact on people’s sleep habits, according to a survey conducted in 17 countries based on the use of mobile phones. Illustration Photography: Aleksander Andersen
How has the pandemic affected our sleep?
Has increased fear led us to need more time to sleep? Or do we sleep more with the home office?
Researchers from Hong Kong and the Czech Republic found an original and exciting way to investigate this.
They collected 17.8 million sleep records from the mobile phones of 93,900 people.
Figures come from 17 countries, including Norway. They then studied the sleep pattern of users when the countries were fully or partially closed in March 2020.
This had a large and surprising effect on mobile phone users.
“The sleep pattern changed immediately,” the researchers write.
I spent more time sleeping
The researchers examined what happened after March 16, when most countries closed or introduced strict infection control measures.
The study, which has been peer-reviewed and published in the European Journal of Public Health, shows surprisingly large results, the researchers believe.
People spent more time sleeping, they showed their mobile phone sleep logs.
On average, it took them 7.1 to 14.2 more minutes to fall asleep.
Norwegian mobile phone users spent an average of 14.9 more minutes falling asleep.
This was a relatively small increase, compared to many other countries. The Austrians and French were clearly the hardest hit after the pandemic.
On the other hand, Swedish mobile phone users changed their sleeping habits as little as possible.
Sweden was the country in the survey that closed the least. The Swedes used approx. 10 more minutes, compared to what they did before.
Will we sleep more during the pandemic?
The second change the researchers noticed was how long people stayed in bed.
At the same time that people were spending more time sleeping, the figures showed that people were sleeping more.
Home offices, closed schools, curfews, and other infectious measures had measurable consequences.
It was longer in the morning before those mobiles were used again.
Mobile users slept between 13.3 and 18.3 minutes longer, compared to before the pandemic. Figures apply to business days. On weekends, the differences were much smaller.
Those who slept the least time were the Danes and the Finns.
The length increased the most among mobile users in Hungary, France and Poland.
Norwegian mobile phone users slept an average of 12.33 minutes longer than before.
The researchers believe that the changes can be explained mainly by the fact that more people worked from home during this period.
This is how mobile phones were used to study our sleep habits
The data used by researchers from Hong Kong and the Czech Republic only includes mobile phone users who used the “Sleep as Android” application.
This is an application that is used as a smart alarm clock. Before going to bed, they pressed the “start sleep tracking” function. Users wake up from their own sleep cycles.
And the app can make sure to measure that you have actually woken up when the alarm goes off. This was defined as the amount of time they spoke on the phone or used it.
But how did the researchers measure how long it took them to fall asleep?
It happened that the users’ vet used an automatic function that measured when they fell asleep using various aids. Some wore bracelets, while others used the sound of snoring or an ultrasonic tracking feature.
The data only includes users who agreed that the data was used.
How much can we trust these numbers?
This type of analysis of people’s sleep habits would be very difficult without mobile phones. But at the same time, the method also has several weaknesses.
If users use the application incorrectly or the mobile cannot detect when they fell asleep, the numbers may be incorrect.
For some of the countries, the number of users was relatively low in the March-April period. they participated relatively low.
The survey also mainly includes younger people. The average age of the participants was just under 40 years old. The researchers estimate that users also had better salaries. Also, they were more interested in studying their dream as they chose to use the app.
Therefore, this means that they are not a representative sample.
Several others report more depression, anxiety, and trouble sleeping during the pandemic. The question of the long-term consequences of the pandemic for public health is now the subject of several research projects.
