Sleep and the Lunar Phase especially Full Moon Correlate. According to Research!

Sleep and the Lunar Phase, especially during the full moon, seems to correlate.

If you find yourself sleeping later or sleeping less this week, it could be because of the moon! Researchers are finding that your sleep quality and routines seem to be fluctuating based on the Lunar Cycle.

Now you may think this is some superstition. Or some claims made based on some sort of beliefs. Or that this all has to do with spirituality.

While that may very well be the case. We just can’t prove it.

In terms of science however, there is in fact a quantifiable relationship between how well you sleep and what the moon is doing!

In the journal “Science Advances”, researchers published an article which documents their discovery they made while studying people in rural Argentina, and Urban Washington. Tracking their sleep quality, all the while keeping an eye on the moon. In Argentina they tracked three indigenous communities and in Washington they tracked University of Washington students. Sleep tracking was done with state of the art sleep wrist monitors.

What they find is astonishing. It appears that the moon affects sleep duration by up to 90 minutes! They sleep 90 minutes less that is. That’s one hour and a half of sleep time gone into thin air.

So in a nutshell. When the lunar cycle comes to its tail-end every 29 and a half days and goes into the period between the phase called “new moon” where the moon is hard to see, and at its brightest and fullest which is a phase called “full moon”, sleep goes out the window.  Well, an hour and a half of sleep that is. The Daily Mail reports that participants in this study got the least amount of sleep on the nights before a full moon.

What is strange is that even in rural settings where the moon is not necessarily visible or at the forefront of our mind, the effect still holds true.

Now the reason. Well, as is the case with most of these kinds of stories, scientists are not quite sure of the cause. It could be our innate circadian clock or some other signal that we don’t quite understand yet.

Or maybe it just has something to do with werewolves. You never know!