TUCSON, Ariz. — University of Arizona Sleep and Health Research Expert Dr. Michael Grandner and his team are taking a closer look at the impact of COVID-19 on sleep patterns and they need your help to do it.
Sleep is something we all need, while some of us get just enough others are always trying to catch up and nowadays some believe that COVID-19 might actually be infecting our dreams and sleep patterns.
“It started back in when the stay at home orders started. All of my patients in clinic started talking about these crazy dreams they were having. People are dreaming about infection, dreams where they’re wearing masks in their dream, or things like dreaming about going out not going out worrying about things happening,” he said.
COVID-somnia, corona-dreams and nightmares these terms are making rounds on the web. Grandner says those dreams are likely to happen more towards the end of the night or just before you wake up.
“If it's happening and it seems to be there’s a couple of reasons why. One is dreams are how we take the world around us and integrate it with our knowledge and our experience. Another reason is our sleep schedules are changing. We launched the study to get a handle on what people are experiencing out there how can we quantify how much of these experiences people are having and what are they like its unfolding now,” he said.
If you’re not getting enough sleep during the night there are ways to get back on track. Grandner says one of the biggest things you can do is put your cell phone in sleep mode.
“You might need to set a bedtime alarm instead of a wake-up alarm. Don’t spend time awake in bed the more time you spend awake in bed you start programming your brain to be awake in bed,” Grandner said.
The COVID sleep study started in August and so far, they have about 200 people registered and they’re hoping to get 1,000 signed-up. The project is being done with volunteers and no funding. All you have to do is fill out a questionnaire online so researchers can find out more about the phenomenon.
"We’re going to run this study as long as we can as long as it's still useful and we’ll crunch the numbers and hopefully have some real cool stories to tell,” Grandner said.
