The 5 Causes of Sleep Problems in the COVID-19 Crisis

For more than a year, the coronavirus crisis has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, both personally and privately and professionally and publicly.

What began as a health problem that mainly affected physical health, quickly also became a social, economic and even political problem with implications for our way of behaving, feeling and thinking.

Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the facets of daily life that the pandemic has had a lot of influence on is our ability to sleep well and get enough hours. After all, we dedicate a large part of the day to this activity, and our well-being depends on it. Therefore, in this article we are going to talk about the main causes of sleep problems triggered by the COVID-19 crisis.

Table of Contents

Why is lack of sleep a major psychological problem?

Let’s start by clarifying why the impact on sleep quality of a crisis like COVID-19 must be taken seriously.

Many people assume that not sleeping well or not sleeping for enough hours generates, at most, a feeling of discomfort that lasts for almost the entire next day. However, the truth is that The negative consequences of this type of problems go beyond that feeling of discomfort, and have objective implications.not just subjective.

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The simple fact of sleeping poorly on a single day of rest gives rise to these short-term imbalances:

Furthermore, if these sleep problems accumulate over the days, other psychological problems appear in the medium and long term. The most significant are the following:

And, of course, to all this we must add physical health problems, such as a greater predisposition to obesity and cardiovascular diseases, an acceleration of aging, and other alterations that, if necessary, could even result in death if the The situation lasts too long and there is very little sleep.

The main causes of sleep problems in the coronavirus pandemic

Obviously, during the coronavirus crisis it is possible to have very diverse sleeping problems, and based on a wide variety of causes. Furthermore, rarely does a psychological problem have a single trigger; We always have to talk about multicausality.

However, if we focus on the causes of sleep problems characteristic of this era, the following are worth highlighting.

1. Anxiety problems based on job and financial insecurity

The economies of many States have faltered greatly during the pandemic, and this has been reflected in the mental health of hundreds of thousands of workers, especially in the case of people in precarious situations, for whom a layoff or Closing a business can cost them more.

When faced with these types of sources of anxiety, it is common to have problems falling asleep, since The brain tends to stay “on the go” and with a high level of activation, anticipating catastrophic situations and/or seeking urgent solutions..

2. Rumination due to fear of infections

The fact that COVID-19 takes several days to generate symptoms causes many people to become obsessed with the idea of having the virus, leading to rumination: the tendency to turn over and over again a type of thought that produces worry. This occurs especially in people who are apprehensive about diseases and are easily suggestible, since they interpret a wide variety of events as a sign or symptom of potentially severe pathology.

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3. Depressive symptoms associated with loneliness due to confinement measures

Both the confinement measures applied to the general population and quarantine situations can emotionally overwhelm people, especially the most extroverted. It is not easy to adapt to a routine characterized by the lack of face-to-face contact with others.and this can lead to problems sleeping well.

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4. Destructuring of schedules

A change such as going from working in the office to working from home can eliminate many temporal references that structured the day-to-day life of the person who teleworks.

For example, you can fall into the trap of leaving a good part of your tasks until evening, which delays bedtime (especially if you can’t finish on time and try to compensate by waking up early). In addition, disorganization in schedules is also something that in itself harms the quality of sleep, even if the person sleeps enough hours.

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5. Family or grief problems

Finally, the causes of sleep problems may be facilitated by the pandemic indirectly, for the crises that it may have generated in the family: arguments at home, sick family members, death of loved ones, etc.

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