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Social jet lag – a syndrome related to the lag between the body's internal clock and the realities of our daily schedules – was previously linked to health problems. Now the researchers reporting in Current biology On November 15, we found a way to measure social jet lag among citizens across the country: by analyzing patterns of activity on the Twitter social media platform.
"When we look at the evolution of jet lag over the course of the year, we find that the dominant effect is by far the social calendar," says Michael Rust of the University of Chicago. "This suggests that humans in modern societies, at least Twitter users in 2013-2014, have biological rhythms somewhat disconnected from the changing light of the sun throughout the year."
Previous researchers have measured social jet lag by looking for differences in waking and sleeping time between weekdays and weekends and using specialized activity monitors. Instead, Rust and his colleagues simply collected easily available Twitter data for more than 1,500 counties in the United States during the 2012-2013 calendar years, every 15 minutes. These geographically labeled tweets accounted for about 240,000 people. The ability to monitor the evolution of Twitter's activity patterns, season by season and county by county, allowed them to separately evaluate the influence of the socially defined calendar and changes in the time of day throughout the year. year.
The researchers found that prolonged periods of low activity on Twitter correlated with sleep patterns measured by traditional surveys. The nocturnal appeasement of activity on Twitter has shifted to the hours later on weekends compared to the days of the week, which indicates a social jetlag.
The magnitude of this "social jet lag on Twitter" has varied with the seasons and geographical regions, with the west coast experiencing less jet lag on Twitter compared to the central and eastern United States. It has also been correlated with average transportation schedules, including the number of people performing shift work, and disease risk factors such as obesity, the researchers reported.
Most counties experienced the largest amount of social jitter on Twitter in February and the lowest in June or July. The evidence is consistent with the notion that these trends stem mainly from social pressures, including changing school schedules, and less from the direct seasonal effect of changing the length of the day.
"For the limited number of counties with unified school schedules for which calendars are readily available, the social jet lag aligns almost perfectly with calendars, even if the Twitter user population does not fit perfectly. is clearly not only students, "said Rust. "This is consistent with some studies suggesting that the effect of the sun on our lives could lessen over time, perhaps as we spend more time indoors watching our phones. "
The new findings help confirm the previously observed trends, including a link between social jet lag and obesity, as well as the fact that people sleep more on the west coast. It shows that such trends can easily be studied from pre-existing data on the use of social media instead of questionnaires designed to target a specific hypothesis.
In the future, the researchers said they would like to develop tools to help individuals better understand their body's circadian clock and improve their lives based on their own temporal data. Rust reports that they are now "thinking of ways to do it".
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