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.”
Debra, such an interesting study! I am now eager to watch the full moon, and track my sleep, especially because some nights, I’m really tossing and turning lately.
Let me know what happens. I’m going to do the same.
Even without reading the data, I can easily believe it. Living on the Long Island Sound, I witness the highly visible effects of the gravitational pull caused by a full moon. The ocean tides are much higher during the full (and new) moons, as the stronger gravitational pull grabs the sea water and moves it further onto the shores. Whenever we have a bad storm that involves wind, the meteorologists are quick to emphasize how much worse the height of the waves will be if we are at or near a full moon. Considering that the human body is largely comprised of water, it is reasonable to conclude that the increased gravitational pull of a full moon on earth’s water would also affect the human body in a myriad of ways. Thanks for sharing this study!
I”ve also heard that maternity wards begin to fill up as the moon
grows fuller. All that amniotic water! Amazing the pull of the moon.