Stadium.Science

Sleep is extremely vulnerable to, and modulated by, external stressors. From global events to personal circumstances, our experiences can shape how well we sleep. Politics, elections, pandemics, stress, identity, and uncertainty can influence the quality of your sleep, but could something as specific as the cryptocurrencies you hold influence your sleep quality? At Stadium Science, we are embarking on an innovative exploration to find out.

Stressful events have been shown to disrupt sleep across populations. For example, a 2019 study by Anyz found that sleep was significantly reduced in the UK the night before the Brexit poll, and in the US the night before the 2016 presidential election. Interestingly, sleep was perturbed internationally before the US election, but not before the Brexit poll. This suggests that the scale and spread of sleep disturbances reflects how impactful an event is perceived to be.

Could the sleep quality of distinct groups of people then tell us how impacted they feel by specific circumstances? Research by Sheehan and Martin revealed that stress from the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected sleep quality in individuals. Specifically, they found that Democrats and Independents had worse sleep quality than Republicans after the pandemic in the politically divided state of Arizona. These findings suggest that individual identity, including one’s political alignment, can influence how easily perturbed one’s sleep is by specific events.

Sheehan and Martin hypothesized that this worsened sleep quality in Democrats and Independents could be due to feelings of disempowerment. Our psychology and physiology are extremely intertwined, and so heightened emotions- such as those eroded by political events or financial uncertainty- can disrupt sleep. 

While studies have explored how political and social identities influence sleep, there’s a growing curiosity about whether financial identities- such as investment portfolios- play a similar role. Investments, especially in volatile markets like cryptocurrency, can carry emotional weight. Cryptocurrency communities seem to be particularly invested in tracking how their assets fair, with occasionally dramatic swings in specific coin’s values. So, do the holders of specific coins- with their unique subcultures and market behaviors- have better or worse sleep?

At Stadium Science, we’re exploring these questions by inviting participants to link their crypto wallets with their sleep data. This approach not only provides a fascinating window into how financial identities shape sleep, but also a novel way to engage the crypto community in the science of sleep. Additionally, through our community predictions of which groups will sleep better, we will learn how much stress people perceive each currency holder to be experiencing. This alone will be an interesting experiment to understand the relationship between cryptocurrency investments and emotion.

While we will eventually need more Sleeper’s in the Stadium to make solid scientific conclusions about this topic, this initial launch will allow us to build the base pipeline in order to immediately scale up once we allow more Sleepers to join our program. 

While this study is just the beginning, by combining sleep data with investment holdings, we hope to uncover insights that go beyond the numbers on a screen. Whether you’re a crypto enthusiast or just someone curious about the science of sleep, we invite you to join us on this journey. After all, the better we understand the factors influencing our rest, the better equipped we are to improve it.

References:

Sheehan, Connor M., and Nathan D. Martin. “Does Sleep Quality Differ across Political Parties? Results from a Survey of Arizona Adults.” Sleep Health, vol. 10, no. 5, 10 Aug. 2024, pp. 590–593

Anýž J, Bakštein E, Dudysová D, Veldová K, Kliková M, Fárková E, Kopřivová J, Španiel F. “No wink of sleep: Population sleep characteristics in response to the brexit poll and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Soc Sci Med. Feb. 2019.