A recent study shows the Covid-19 lockdown triggered a sharp increase in anxiety-related sleeping problems. The worst-affected were recorded as mothers, key workers, and people from minority ethnic backgrounds. One in four suffer from sleep loss as a direct result of the huge disruption to people's social and working lives.
In a report in The Guardian quoted Prof Jane Falkingham, from the Economic and Social Research Council-funded Centre for Population Change at Southampton University, as saying, “Sleep loss affected more people during the first four weeks of the Covid-19 related lockdown than it did before. We observed a large increase in the number of Britons, both men and women, suffering from anxiety-induced sleep problems.”
He added, “This reflects stress levels due to anxieties about health, financial consequences, changes in social life and the daily routine, all of which may affect sleep.” The research team studied 15,360-strong sample of the population, looking at how people aged 16 and above slept both before the pandemic struck in March and then in April.
The overall incidence of worry-related sleep loss rose from 15.7 per cent to 24.7 per cent. But that 9 per cent increase nationally masked much bigger spikes in certain groups, particularly mothers of young children. While the number of men experiencing poor sleep rose from 11.9 per cent to 16.5 per cent, the increase in women shot up from 18.9 per cent to 31.8 per cent.
