SDG 3 | Health & Wellness
Nights above 20ºC have skyrocketed this 2022, which makes it difficult to rest at night and deteriorates long-term health
This summer, extreme heat and tropical nights are two concepts that grab headlines and minutes on television and radio. The heat waves of recent weeks and months are leaving daytime and nighttime temperatures that mark new milestones in the country’s meteorological history. Records that make life difficult during the day and rest at night.
By definition, tropical nights are those in which “the mercury does not fall below 20ºC”, recalls José Antonio Maldonado, director of meteorology at Meteored. “It does not stop there, with the passage of time it is becoming common to talk about torrid nights, those that do not drop below 25ºC, something unthinkable until recently,” adds Samuel Biener, a geographer.
Figures that make it especially difficult to fall asleep. “Temperature is essential for sleeping,” explains Carlos Egea, a member of the Spanish Sleep Society. “The ideal range is between 19 and 22ºC”, he details. “Above and below it is difficult to fall asleep,” he warns.
Scientific and medical literature until not long ago saw light as one of the great factors to be able to rest. “We have always thought that the onset of sleep had to do with darkness and the absence of light,” says Egea. “And it’s not entirely true,” she counters.
“The temperature is essential for sleeping and the ideal range is between 19ºC and 22ºC”
Carlos Egea
member of the Spanish Sleep Society
Despite the fact that “we are circadian animals”, Egea recalls, that is, light influences human rest. “Several studies have shown that it is not the only factor,” she warns. Researchers at the UT Southwestern Medical Center in the United States point to temperature as another key player. “That’s why you can’t sleep in places where it’s very hot,” the doctor replies.
To start the sleep cycle, “we have to lower peripheral body temperature by half a degree,” says Egea. “That is why, for example, it is not recommended to exercise before going to sleep, because the body heats up and you do not rest. If you don’t lose heat, you don’t sleep.”
The average number of days a year with temperatures above 20ºC is beating this exercise. In Segovia, 19 tropical nights have already been recorded, when the average was 0; in Palma de Mallorca 63 compared to 40 that mark the records; in Malaga 54 compared to the usual 45 or in San Sebastián 17 compared to 5. «In the urban centers of cities such as Valencia or Alicante, for example, the number of nights that do not drop below 20 ºC is already around 90 per year,” says the geographer Biener.
An increasingly frequent anomaly that “is going to force us to rethink our bedrooms,” explains Egea. “But this is already something that happened with the first hominid,” she recalls. «He got into a cave, because it was cooler, he closed the cave to protect himself and maintain the temperature. It’s evolution,” she notes.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going back to the caves,” Egea replies with a laugh. But the bedrooms will have to pay more attention to the systems that control the temperature in the bedrooms and “not just be a mattress with a light on it like before,” she warns.
heat causes poor health
At the last United Nations summit in Stockholm+50, the World Health Organization warned of the “serious risks” that climate change entails for people’s health, both at a “mental and well-being level”. “We know that if one does not sleep enough hours, known as the therapeutic window (7 or 9 hours), he will live less and his aging will be less healthy”, highlights Dr. Egea.
“By the end of the century, 50 hours a year could be lost if carbon emissions continue more or less their current course”
Poor sleep causes discouragement, apathy, irritability, moodiness, and lightheadedness. “In fact, a sleepless night elevates two proteins in the brain that we know have a lot to do with neuron death,” he warns.
To this, recalls the member of the Spanish Sleep Society, it must be added that “high temperatures worsen air quality” and that, he assures, “will trigger respiratory diseases.”
The costs of sleep, warn Danish researchers in
One Earth, will rise as temperatures rise, potentially costing sleepers an additional 13 to 15 days of poor sleep each year. “By the end of the century, 50 hours a year could be lost if carbon emissions continue more or less their current course,” they point out in his research.
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