Higher Nocturnal Temperatures Shorten and Worsen Sleep with No Clear Evidence of Short-Term Compensatory Patterns

Warmer-than-usual nights in home-care workers in Switzerland are linked to shorter total sleep time and worse subjective sleep quality, with no meaningful change in sleep maintenance efficiency.

• Why it matters: Rising nighttime temperatures threaten sleep, but large longitudinal evidence integrating objective and subjective measures—and testing delayed effects—has been limited.
• What they did: Using wearable-derived and subjective sleep data from 326 home-care workers (14,290 participant-nights) with MeteoSwiss monitoring, Bayesian multilevel models tested same-night associations and exploratory 1–2 night lags for seven sleep parameters.
• The result: Total sleep time was 13.3 min shorter at +5C versus a participant’s usual exposure, subjective sleep-quality worsened by 1.2 points, and the probability of sleeping <7 h was 10.6 percentage points higher than at -4C; sleep-stage and recovery changes were very small with little evidence of consistent delayed effects.

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