This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: South Africa endured its worst year of load shedding (scheduled power cuts by the country's utility, Eskom) in 2023. The power went off on 335 of the year's 365 days, often several times a day.
Since then, the country has gone more than a year and a half without these planned power cuts. Much has been written about how load shedding affected businesses, health care and the economy. But far less is known about the effect on people's sleep.
As sleep scientists and members of the South African Society for Sleep and Health (SASSH), we are interested in studying, and raising awareness about, the importance of sleep to people's well-being. People usually sleep within a specific window of time, and if their sleep is interrupted, they get less sleep. Fragmented sleep and short sleep duration have been associated with poor health and cognitive outcomes, including higher cardiometabolic risk (diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems), lower cognitive performance (attention, executive function and learning), higher risk of developing depression or anxiety and chronic pain.
Sleep is easily disturbed by the world around us, including light, noise, temperature and worry. Load shedding changes all of these at once. We wanted to gain insight into how load shedding affected the sleep of university students in particular.
This seemed an important group to study, as they already tend to sleep poorly, keep irregular hours and carry heavy workloads. Any extra disruption could, therefore, have an impact on both their health and their studies. Between August and November 2023, more than 1,100 students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg completed our anonymous online survey.
We asked how load shedding affected their sleep, whether they had access to backup power and how outages affected their studying and grades. Specifically, we wanted to understand how access to alternative power sources might make a difference to sleep. Load shedding has eased, but South Africa's grid remains under pressure.
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