If you struggle with falling asleep at night, then you may want to blame your well-lit neighborhood, a new study has found, suggesting that light pollution may be interfering with your sleep.
Stanford University’s Maurice Ohayon said, “Our world has become a 24/7 society. We use outdoor lighting such a street lights to be more active at night and to increase our safety and security, reducing our exposure to darkness. It could be affecting our sleep.”
For the study, 15,863 people were interviewed by phone over an eight-year period. They were asked about sleep habits, quality of sleep as well as medical and psychiatric disorders. Then, with nighttime data from the defense meteorological satellite program, the researchers looked at how much outdoor light those people were exposed to at night. People living in urban areas of 5,00,000 people or more were exposed to nighttime lights that were three to six times more intense than people living in small towns and rural areas.
The study shows that nighttime light affects sleep duration and was significantly associated with sleep disturbances. People living in more intense light areas were 6% more likely to sleep less than six hours per night than people in less intense light areas.