We feel it. Do you feel it?
Social jet lag has only become a ‘thing’ in recent years.
It’s basically when our sleeping patterns shift because of weekends and holidays, and it’s usually associated with the use of social media and our use of technology (think along the lines of us staying up hours on end watching something on Netflix).
Usually we we wake up sooner than our body clocks would like during the week with work, college and whatever else we have going on. Then come the weekends, we want a lie in… and that’s when social jet lag sets in.
A new study tried to look at the reasons behind social jet lag after a recent study said that the phenomenon plays a “significant role in your health.”
It looked at 246,000 users on Twitter to look at when people were going to sleep and waking up.
Before this, researchers believed that social jetlag is caused by the seasons and daylight savings time.
However, Aaron Dinner, professor of chemistry said of the study: “We started the study expecting it to be a solar or seasonal effect – that your internal clock will shift in the summer and that will lead to decreases in social jet lag.
“But in fact, that’s not what we found at all. People get up later on weekdays in the summer because their social constraints are relaxed. Weekend behaviour – and presumably a person’s biological clock – does not change much over the year in most counties.”
