Tech Radar: A new study from Uppsala University, Sweden, published Science of the Total Environment, finds an association between the lunar cycle and sleep.
It also discovered that men’s sleep may be more powerfully influenced by the lunar cycle than women’s.
The researchers in Sweden compared one-night at-home sleep recordings from 492 women and 360 men they took into account the exact phase of the moon.
“We found that men whose sleep was recorded during nights in the waxing period of the lunar cycle exhibited lower sleep efficiency, and increased time awake after sleep onset,” said Christian Benedict, Associate Professor at Uppsala University’s Department of Neuroscience, and corresponding author of the study. That was compared to men whose sleep was measured during nights in the moon’s waning period. There was another surprise. “The sleep of women remained largely unaffected by the lunar cycle,” said Benedict.
