Sleep and global warming: How will we sleep when the Earth is hotter?

Abstract

Societal concern about climate change and global warming has grown worldwide along with the concomitant awareness that health will be impacted deeply. Among living beings, humans have quite large capacities for adaptation to varied temperature conditions. Despite their tropical origin, they live under all Earth climates, such as polar, temperate, altitude, arid, and tropical climates, using a wide range of behavioral and physiological adaptive responses. We address the adaptive abilities of human sleep-wake regulation and its interplay with thermoregulation under different natural climates. Sleep represents one-third of our living time and is also a major determinant of morbidity and mortality; shortening sleep duration increases mortality and multimorbidity. In addition, major advances in sleep neurology have occurred in the last decades. Some have been extensively reviewed, notably comparative sleep physiology among animals, allowing one to hypothesize about the functions of the different sleep states, as well as their relation to cognitive neuroscience or body biorhythms. However, the question of the sleep adaptive capacity of humans to global warming has barely been addressed. We examine “normal” sleep and thermoregulation in young adults residing in temperate conditions. We then review the sleep and thermoregulatory reactions under various climatic conditions, demonstrating the role of sleep changes as potent adaptive responses to living under natural hot climatic conditions. As a result, we show that humans are well-equipped to adapt to severe climates.