But as it continues over time, most people become less able to cope, resulting in greater problems, including insomnia,” says Drake. “Initially, people tended to feel motivated to get through the stress. Our general sense of uncertainty and lack of control can also feed into sleep issues, while the pandemic’s longevity is also a factor what started out as a “hunkering down” period to play video games and stockpile toilet paper has become a landscape for life that feels semi-permanent. Many of us are experiencing mental health problems, which can feed into sleep problems, or vice versa. “People tend to be staying up later.” For many of us, leaving “work at work” is now completely impossible, and disconnecting from the to-do lists and daily stresses of the workday is harder than ever.Īdded to this is the fact that we miss our hobbies and friends – vital outlets for relaxation and destressing. “We tend to have much less clear boundaries between home and work,” says Altchuler. The problem is that working from home can blur lines that used to be fixed, with many people reporting working longer or irregular hours. Unemployment in many countries is the highest it’s been in years, so it’s no surprise those who are employed want to work hard to keep their jobs. There’s also the issue of work performance. She also flags up the fact that when we work from home, we may be getting less exercise and potentially less exposure to natural light – both of which contribute to better sleep. Now, we’re all just home all the time,” says Angela Drake, a clinical health professor at the University of California, Davis who treats patients with sleep disorders and who’s written about coronasomnia.
“Your brain is conditioned: you’re always at your workplace and working, and then at your home and you’re relaxing.
“What you’re doing is disrupting your body’s clock.” “We lost many of the external cues that are present in the office meetings, the scheduled lunch breaks,” says Altchuler. Normally, our days run to a schedule of alarm clocks, commutes, breaks and bedtimes – but Covid-19 has shaken all that up. First, our daily routines and environments have been disrupted, making it hard to keep our circadian rhythm intact. It’s a consequence of all the changes we’re experiencing in Covid,” he says. “If you’re having insomnia, you’re in good company – much of the world is, too. That so many of us are currently experiencing sleeplessness comes down to the current configuration of challenging, “almost Biblical” circumstances, says Dr Steven Altchuler, a psychiatrist and neurologist who specialises in sleep medicine at the Mayo Clinic, one of the US’s largest medical research organisations. Sleep insufficiency – which many health authorities classify as less than seven hours a night – also affects your work many studies have shown that it makes you more likely to make mistakes, wrecks your concentration, increases reaction times and affects your moods. Consistently having trouble falling asleep, or experiencing poor quality sleep, can lead to long-term health impacts including obesity, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Insomnia, whether in a pandemic or not, is difficult to live with. Yet the scale of the problem could potentially bring change, introducing new elements into how we treat sleep disorders – and get our lives back on track. Our health and productivity could face serious problems because of it. With the pandemic into its second year, months of social distancing have rocked our daily routines, erased work-life boundaries and brought ongoing uncertainty into our lives – with disastrous consequences for sleep. The word “insomnia” was Googled more in 2020 than it ever had been before. An “alarming prevalence” of clinical insomnia was observed in Italy, and in Greece, nearly 40% of respondents in a May study were shown to have insomnia. In China, insomnia rates rose from 14.6% to 20% during peak lockdown.
In the UK, an August 2020 study from the University of Southampton showed that the number of people experiencing insomnia rose from one in six to one in four, with more sleep problems in communities including mothers, essential workers and BAME groups.
This is the phenomenon that’s hit people all over the world as they experience insomnia linked to the stress of life during Covid-19. Some experts even have a term for it: ‘coronasomnia’ or ‘Covid-somnia’. But there’s a problem: the ongoing coronavirus crisis has made getting a good night’s rest significantly harder. One of the most perennially popular goals is, unsurprisingly, getting more sleep.
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