{"id":14269,"date":"2019-09-17T18:06:12","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T18:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/squad\/?p=14269"},"modified":"2019-09-17T18:06:12","modified_gmt":"2019-09-17T18:06:12","slug":"the-moons-effects-on-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/sexual-health\/the-moons-effects-on-sleep\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moon\u2019s Effects on Sleep"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The moon influences everything from tides to corals, but does it affect our sleep?<\/p>\n<h3>Studying moon cycles and sleep<\/h3>\n<p>In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, researchers conducted studies to try to determine if women\u2019s menstrual cycles were affected by the moon. Although the studies may have been too small to confirm anything, some of the studies did find changes in melatonin levels, menstrual cycles, and moon phases. Because melatonin regulates our sleep-wake cycle, these studies helped add to the theory that the moon affects our sleep.<\/p>\n<p>More recent studies seem to point to the idea that the moon affects our quality of sleep.<\/p>\n<p>In 2014, a study of 319 people found that during a full moon, participants remained awake or in a state of light sleep the majority of the time they were in bed. The research on this low sleep efficiency was published in the journal <i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sleep Medicine.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p>Before you assume it may just be the bright light of the full moon keeping you awake, consider this: A 2013 analysis of data on a previous sleep study found that exposure to bright moonlight couldn\u2019t be a factor in many of the studies because the participants slept in a windowless, dark controlled environment.<\/p>\n<p>For the study, 33 volunteers slept in windowless rooms for 3.5 days. The scientists measured:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> brain activity during sleep<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> melatonin levels<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> changes in sleep structure<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> cortisol levels<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The results<\/h3>\n<p>The researchers found that immediately before and after a full moon:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> sleep duration fell by 20 minutes.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> participants took about 5 minutes longer, on average, to fall asleep.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> melatonin levels dropped.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> sleep was lighter than usual.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cThe lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep,\u201d explains lead researcher Christian Cajochen of the University of Basel in Switzerland, \u201ceven when one does not \u2018see\u2019 the moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The moon influences everything from tides to corals, but does it affect our sleep? Studying moon cycles and sleep In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, researchers conducted studies to try to determine if women\u2019s menstrual cycles were affected by the moon. Although the studies may have been too small to confirm anything, some of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[689],"tags":[693],"class_list":["post-14269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sexual-health","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}