How many of you, dear readers, have had a sleepless night or two or three recently? Trouble getting to sleep? Trouble staying asleep? It just might be the moon.  Allyson Chiu’s recent article in the Washington Post reports , “A paper published this week in the journal Science Advances found that people tend to have a harder time sleeping in the days leading up to a full moon. …Ahead of the full moon, it took people, on average, 30 minutes longer to fall asleep and they slept for 50 minutes less, said Leandro Casiraghi, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. ‘What we did is we came up with a set of data that shockingly proves that this is real, that there’s an actual effect of the moon on our sleep,’ Casiraghi said.”

Having just spent three restless nights alternating between trying to sleep and giving up, this finding hit home. Now I’m curious to see what happens right before the next full moon. Nature’s influence upon is inescapable. We so often forget that we are Nature, too.

Here is the original report published in the journal.