Want a better night's sleep? Go camping |
Want a better night's sleep? Go camping
From the immense darkness to the sounds of rustling leaves and hooting owls, camping can surprisingly improve your sleep.
I am not a great sleeper. Not terrible, but patchy at best. I'm all too familiar with the long, dark hours when there's nothing for it but to readjust my eye mask and resist the urge to pass the time in the glow of my TikTok feed.
Despite this, I've attempted a night here and there in some challenging places. I've pitched tents in Scottish snowstorms and Amazonian downpours, on damp Swedish islands and damper Glastonbury fields. Strange noises and hard ground usually meant sleep didn't come easily, and my tent now languishes at the back of a cupboard.
According to research though, if I want to get a better night's sleep, I'd do well to get back into camping.
Most of us go to bed well after the Sun does, and this mismatch has physical and mental health impacts. Research suggests that sleeping outside can help counter this by giving us a better chance of staying in tune with the Sun and Moon; scientists have found that spending a weekend camping can reset our circadian clock so that it better aligns with the world outside. For most of us, that means shifting our sleep a bit earlier – and avoiding the health issues associated with sleeping late, including cardiovascular disease and depression.
Fifteen years ago, Kenneth Wright, lead author of the study and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, set out to explore how camping impacts sleep as a proxy for understanding our circadian clocks better.
Wright wanted to understand just how out of step our circadian rhythms – the natural sleep-wake cycle that repeats every 24 hours – are today with the natural world that humans evolved in. He decided to take a small group of people on a weeklong summer camping trip in the Rocky Mountains to immerse them in the natural cycles of day and night. This meant no torches or phones, and exposure to four times more natural daylight than they usually experienced during the day.
Wright collected the participants' saliva to measure their levels of the hormone melatonin – a biological marker of night time – throughout the night before and after the trip. The results showed that their circadian clock shifted two hours earlier following the camping trip. "A key finding from the study is that our circadian rhythm is earlier after [exposure to the] natural light-dark cycle, which means we're later in our modern world," Wright says.
The campers' melatonin levels dropped shortly before they woke up – whereas when they had been sleeping at home, melatonin levels stayed high for a while into the morning. "Our modern [artificial] light exposure changes our circadian rhythm such that in the hours after we wake up, our circadian clock in our brain is telling us we should still be asleep," Wright says. "We should be asleep for [another] couple of hours in some cases."
In this sense, sleeping outside keeps us "more in sync with our biology, not just the environment", he says. By shifting our rhythms earlier, sleeping outdoors has real consequences for our health. "Later sleep timing or a later timing of our circadian rhythm is associated with a number of negative health outcomes. Earlier types have [fewer] health problems – they have less substance abuse, depression, obesity,........