Moving to Alaska is an exciting adventure, but it comes with unique challenges, especially when it comes to adjusting your sleep patterns. Alaska’s extreme variations in daylight—from long, bright summers to dark, cold winters—can significantly impact your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. If you’ve recently moved to the Last Frontier, you may find it difficult to maintain a regular sleep routine, but with some planning and mindfulness, you can adjust to Alaska’s unique light cycles and ensure you’re getting the rest you need.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how Alaska’s environment affects sleep and provide practical tips for adapting your sleep patterns to your new surroundings.

When things begin to heat up, it is very important to recognize the impact that hot weather can have on sleep, both quantity and quality. In the summer months, especially if you do not have AC, you may find yourself tossing and turning, throwing off the sheets, waking multiple times at night, etc. This can be a source of frustration and fatigue. Continue reading to learn more about ways to sleep in hot weather.

Why Light Extremes Can Cause or Worsen Insomnia

For those living in Alaska, it’s no secret that we are operating under “unique” circumstances in summer and winter, either a lot of sunlight or a lot of darkness respectively. Though it might seem counter intuitive, the amount of excess darkness, which is significant in the Southeast and oppressive in the Far North, actually makes sleep more difficult for many people.

Why?

The excess darkness is extremely disruptive. It disrupts your ability to get daylight and to be physically active. It can also disrupt your hormone levels. The result: there are many ways for your circadian rhythm to be affected.

Why Alaska is Tough on Sleep

Living in Alaska poses unique sleeping challenges most months out of the year. Other than a few months out of the year between “spring” and “fall” in Alaska, we are dealing with darkness that lasts most, or all, of the day, or light that lasts most, or all, of the night.

These extreme light conditions present sleep challenges that are:

• Sociological
• Psychological
• Physiological
• Habitual

These challenges may come from changes in physical or social habits, mental responses to the extreme lighting conditions, or habits that change with the darkness. The two main challenges for people living in Alaska are:

• Insomnia
• Circadian rhythm disorders

Let’s look at how extreme light in Alaska poses these two risks.

Why Sleeping in Alaskan Summers in Difficult (If it Isn’t Obvious)

Alaska is a big state. It’s particularly big from north to south, spanning a total 1,300 miles. Because this state is so big, there are differences in what the north and south experience. Southern parts of Alaska have summer light transitions that are uncomfortable but not drastically different than much of the northern part of the lower 48. From Anchorage on up, however, the transition ranges from drastic to as extreme as it gets.

How much you have to prepare for your transition, and how much it may affect you, largely depends upon:

• How far north you are
• How sensitive you are to light
• Perhaps most importantly, what existing measures you have taken to normalize your circadian rhythm during the winter

On the last bullet point if you have been diligent about any of the following, the transition will likely be easier:

• Using light therapy
• Maintaining pre-sleep rhythm
• Having consistent exercise and eating/drinking habits
• Vitamin D therapy

Why Alaskan Winter Darkness Can Cause Insomnia

Alaskan winters bring about extreme lighting conditions, with most of the day being shrouded in darkness or completely devoid of sunlight. However, contrary to popular belief, this prolonged darkness does not bode well for our sleep. Adjusting to the Alaskan darkness after our vibrant summers requires significant lifestyle changes, and the natural hormonal fluctuations that occur during these long, dark winters only exacerbate our struggle to achieve restful sleep.

Our lives tend to change in predictable ways during winter, sometimes to the point where, on paper, we look like different people between winter and summer in Alaska. The winters can hit many of us particularly hard:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Restlessness
• Feelings of isolation
• Low levels of physical activity
• Little time outside
• Hormonal changes

These symptoms often end up either exacerbating or causing sleep disorders, most commonly insomnia. In addition to these natural responses to the darkness, our melatonin regulation can also be profoundly changed during all of the darkness.

Melatonin regulates our biological clock. It is produced in response to changes in light. The lack of light changes during winter can throw our melatonin regulation completely off, and in consequence, and combined with other factors, our sleep schedule can become whacky as well – i.e., exhibit or exacerbate classic signs of insomnia:

• Can’t fall asleep
• Can’t sleep until a normal hour in the morning
• Keep waking up throughout the night

If this sounds familiar, then keep reading. Let’s look at good ways to combat the darkness issue.  

How Alaskan Winters Affect Our Lives

Alaskan winters pose and extremely unique challenge to our lives and sleep. Our winters mean either receiving mostly or only darkness, depending on where you live. This extreme lighting condition is contrasted against summer, which is the opposite, and entails making fairly drastic changes to our lives – changes which be very disruptive towards sleep.

The extreme winter darkness means shifting our lives form summer in all ways:

• Sociologically
• Psychologically
• Physiologically
• Habitually

Most of us look like different people in the winter vs the summer: we get outside less, we might work different jobs, the things we do and places we go for fun change, and we may interact with friends less as a result. Furthermore, many of us respond in mental or emotional ways to the darkness, but ways which are unconscious, and our behavior further changes as a result.

Why Darkness Hurts Sleep

Alaskan winters consist of darkness for the majority of the day, while Alaskan summers consist of light for the majority of the day. The extreme lighting conditions of Alaska, especially north, affect Alaskan lives in many different domains:

• Psychologically
• Physiologically
• Habitually
• Emotionally
• Sociologically

While we generally associate darkness with sleep, endless darkness is bad for sleep. This is because melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep, is light sensitive, and either increases production in response to increasing darkness or decreases production in response to increasing light.

Without a change in light, extreme darkness can cause poor melatonin regulation and result in the initiation or worsening of sleeping disorders in many people. Winter sleeping disorders that are most common in Alaska include:

• Insomnia
• Circadian Rhythm disorders
• Restless leg syndrome (RLS)

Due to these changes, Alaskans have to work harder to maintain a normal sleep schedule in winter and to also be wary of symptoms of sleeping disorders such as those listed above. Let’s look at them in more detail.