Endured sleepless nights in the aftermath of the Brexit vote? You weren鈥檛 the only one. A study of 11,600 wearers of Nokia Health monitoring devices shows the changes in our biorhythms during and after monumental political moments, including the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote.
Stress can cause sleepless nights and increase heart rates, but little was known about how this links to big societal changes. 鈥淲e wanted to add in the quantitative data,鈥� says Daniele Quercia of Nokia Bell Labs.
Quercia and his colleagues analysed data from users who wear health monitoring devices, such as smart watches, in San Francisco and London between April 2016 and April 2017. They found that an entire populations鈥� sleeping habits, heart rates and distance walked can swing out of sync after big societal events.
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The proportion of people whose data moved out of sync with the general population鈥檚 norm increased by 30 per cent after the election of Donald Trump, while heart rates rose from 66 beats per minute in San Francisco before his election to 70 beats per minute on election day. Four months later, heart rates had still not returned back to their pre-voting baseline.
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, around one in eight users saw their sleep, movement and heart rate shunted away from the average, with overall sleep time dropping 10 per cent. The changes were different in form, and were more significant, than those observed around events such as Christmas and New Year鈥檚 Eve.
Stress seems to be the likeliest reason for these changes. Quercia and his colleagues mitigated for the many other environmental factors that could be to blame, including the churn of new users, seasonal activity rates and temperature, and hardware and software updates.
鈥淲hen we鈥檙e stressed, our sleep is one of the first things that gets affected,鈥� says Jason Ellis, director of Northumbria University鈥檚 Centre for Sleep Research. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got more to think about, more to cope with, and so in the short term it鈥檚 a normal biological reaction to sleep a little less when you鈥檙e under stress.鈥�
Quercia says that a study of this type wouldn鈥檛 be possible without so many people wearing devices to monitor their own health. 鈥淏efore the use of these health monitoring devices at a large scale, there was no way to cheaply monitor the variations of our biorhythms and the impact different factors can have on our daily lives,鈥� says Quercia.
Quercia and his colleagues plan to pair such data with clinical details of patients to help steer interventions, meaning people have fewer sleepless nights and less strained hearts when these major events happen.
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