Do you sleep more in winter? Or you think that you sleep more in winters?
While the common folks like us continue to be embroiled in a world for measuring our own significance, there is much covert debate on whether the humans need to adjust themselves during colder periods.
It is no surprise that the planet is warming and its effects are visible everywhere. Even in places where snow used to be a show-stopper like Gulmarg, it came when most of its audience left in disguise. Most of the hills got their first major now in later January.
During winters, it is normal to feel sleepy. You are not alone; a study conducted on Americans claim that about one-third of these adults sleep more in winters.
A recent sleep study conducted for around 200 patients at the St. Hedwig Hospital in Berlin, Germany stated that winters led these patients to sleep an hour longer than they did in summer.
However, this is not the point. The eye opener has been the participants getting half an hour more rapid eye movement (REM) sleep during winter.
This component of sleep is the essence of every human’s sleep cycles, featured to enable you to surf into your dream more, especially involving bodily movement and comparatively faster heart and breathing rates than experienced in any other sleep stage.
This crucial stage of sleep helps with memory and concentration, mood regulation and even regulates immune function of the human body.
The reason given for this remains lesser light during the winter months which results in rising melatonin, a hormone responsible to control and maintain sleep-wake cycles.
Here, the body compensates by providing more REM sleep during winters.
With the winters being so uncertain, mental and behavioral health can change significantly. A question arises whether humans need to make meaningful adaptations?
While there are always new speculations and suspicions whether humans shall begin to hibernate. If we believe the experts, there is no such need in case of humans as their ancestors have shown no record of hibernating even during the erstwhile Ice age.
While we discuss what may happen when it is colder. It remains interesting to note that as per several experts, this planet on a larger geological scale is supposed to enter a global cooling phase.
The planet is actually cooling?
Are we confused here? Is the atmosphere getting hot or cold? What is the basis of such climate models suggesting two contradictory things?
Earth’s atmosphere is divided into many 4 layers the closest of which is called troposphere.
This is the only layer that we have encountered with and consequently know best. Why? Because all our weather events happen in this layer.
The answer to all our aforementioned questions, has been that the column of air closer to the Earth’s surface is warming because of its proximity and contact with the Earth residing humans which continue to emit greenhouse gases while most of the atmosphere above this layer that can also be aligned with the limits of troposphere, has been dramatically cooling.
The irony of this situation is that the same gases causing warming in the bottom layer of air are the cause of cooling in any air stretch beyond that.
Among all its layers, this layer of Earth is only about 8- 20 kms in its range yet holds 80 percent of the atmospheric mass. Mass of the atmosphere in other above layers is scarce with progressively lesser dense air.
Less density means greater distance between molecules, therefore, most of the heat that gets re-emitted by the carbon-di-oxide present in these layers do not find other molecules to bump into and miraculously vanishes into space.
This leads to rapid cooling in the surrounding atmosphere. Another reason for this cooling has been due to current phase in declining solar activity.
Many climate scientists are now beginning to explore and witness several dramatic changes that CO2 is driving. It is puzzling how a simple gas is able to influence universe and its components to this extent.